Elementaire

“Elementaire” is an exhibition finding representation of the diasporic self between pencil and paper. It takes the form of a 96-hour performance showing the processes of how Issi draws, cuts, paints and finds new representations.

It invites people to see the process of drawing as a way to see our process of self-identification. To see that, whether an individual piece of work or a person, the final representation is found through continuous tensions, anxieties, rethinking, sketches, more sketches, errors, corrections, redos, pauses and constant reworking.

To see Issi’s search for his own identity in his search for new drawings is to see that both a drawing and an identity are never finished, but always active and continually rearticulated.

The series sits between the anthropometric scale of Le Corbusier’s Modulor and the principles of sub-Saharan wood sculpture: on one side a scale that represents what is, on the other something that goes beyond human scale, towards the surreal.