CHICAGO—The Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to announce Iman Issa: A Game, or So You May Think, on view now through September 21, 2025. This exhibition of seven recent works from Iman Issa’s ongoing Heritage Studies series illuminates the artist’s consistent desire to pursue an “art that is not exactly part of the world but is certainly tied to it, revealing of it, and not just because it looks or sounds like it.” This is the first substantial presentation of Issa’s Heritage Studies in the United States in a decade, and includes a new work commissioned for the Art Institute.

Issa’s Heritage Studies are sculptures inspired by historical artifacts the artist has seen in museums around the world. The artist’s sculptures are not faithful recreations of these objects,

but new forms that may or may not be formally related to their antecedents. Each work in this series is accompanied by a poetic text describing the object. The smooth forms of the artist’s sculptures are informed by the tension between their origin, meaning, and how audiences encounter them in the world.

“Issa’s exploration of form, color, and texture in her sculptures is accompanied by a basic distrust between what can be seen and what is,” says Giampaolo Bianconi, Dittmer Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art. “What you first see in her work might change once you read the artist’s words. It’s an important reminder about the limits of what we can see in the world, versus what might be true. Sometimes what you see isn’t really what you see.”

Iman Issa: A Game, or So You May Think is curated by Giampaolo Bianconi, Dittmer Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art.

Text: Art Institute of Chicago