Common Elements is an installation made from 54 framed text panels, 14 framed c-prints, five wooden sculptures, five painted white plinths, and source panels and captions. The project challenges the stability of memory, something Fawz Kabra discusses in her essay on the project as part of Platform 007, for which Issa has produced this online presentation.

 

 

 

In Common Elements (2013), a systematic methodology enables Iman Issa to contemplate the instability of memory when it comes to the personal and the collective, the singular and the universal, and the specific and the particular, which references both individual and collective histories. It adopts a method of looking into the past and extracting narratives and meanings to assemble new combinations through abstracted texts, images, and sculptures that speak to a particular present and potential future. As opposed to recollections, memory is instead reimagined, allowing for new forms to emerge. The starting point for the installation was a selection of phrases from four autobiographies by Arab thinkers, activists and authors: Mourid Barghouti, Taha Hussein, Nawal El Saadawi and Edward Said – central figures in Arab cultural knowledge, they redefined political and cultural Arab thought and post-colonial theory, a voice for the oppressed and advocates of human rights. What followed was the production of images and objects using those selected phrases, chosen for their personal resonance with the artist – a sort of déjà vu in which the text demands a double take as it becomes absorbed into the familiarity of not the author, but of another.