Heritage Studies. The winner of the first Han Nefkens Foundation-MACBA contemporay art award
Iman Issa (b. 1979, Cairo) uses non-physical material in her work, relying on fiction while exacerbating the tension between objects and the words, names and adjectives used to describe them. In the words of the art critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie: "In one sense, Issa's work is about radical subtraction. Take the experience of a city, a structure, a monument, a memorial, a campaign poster, a political conflict, an open space, or an evocative story; then strip down the specificities and delete the defining details." Issa uses conventional museological displays such as vitrines, plinths, captions, labels and vinyl text to create frameworks for her objects and narratives, that exist outside of a particular time or place. In her work, history becomes an exercise in an ahistorical storytelling that can concern us all. The winners of the second HNF-MACBA award of contemporary art is the Iranian collective consisting of Ramin & Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian.