Exhibitions
Contemporary Artists
For more than a century, Western museums have narrated the ancient histories of West Asia and North Africa in a single authoritative voice, largely disconnected from the present. Curatorial collaboration with contemporary artists, and the display of their work in the public galleries, are some of the ways new voices and narratives are present throughout the ISAC Museum. Many of the artists we work with have their own connections to the region and its diasporas, and draw on distinct lived experiences, memories, and creative visions. These newly commissioned and existing works—alongside programming with the artists—foreground the complexity and continuity of this cultural heritage, and bring a humanizing perspective to its telling.
Current & Upcoming
September 17, 2026–March 14, 2027
SaraNoa Mark
Syro-Anatolian & Special Exhibit Galleries
Exhibition Details
SaraNoa Mark
Hartapu: The Forgotten King of AnatoliaSaraNoa Mark's practice examines traces left by time, in landscapes and in collective memory. They work with enduring materials to test permanence, and employ subtractive gestures to archive the presence of absence. In their sculptures, time is counted slowly, through repeated gestures. These marks accumulate in works that form a physical accounting, providing an alternative means of measuring temporality outside the system of commodified time. Carving is at the core of their practice, in dialogue with other carved languages—from canyons to cuneiform tablets to sidewalk graffiti—that document an eternal impulse to score stories into place. They seek to transform their materials entirely by stringently reworking that which already exists. The questions driving their work interrogate personal and cultural investments in turning to materiality as a means of transmitting memory. They interrogate the impossible instinct to preserve and retain intangible experience by transferring onto objects the task of surviving time.
Three new works by SaraNoa Mark will be displayed in the ISAC Museum in connection with the upcoming special exhibition, Hartapu: The Forgotten King of Anatolia. Displayed in the Syro-Anatolian Gallery and the Special Exhibit Gallery, these works reflect on landscape, memory, and the labor and care of preserving the past. Mark developed the works in conversation with archaeologist Akiva Sanders, whose series of essays about them appears in his Substack newsletter, Surviving the Flood.
(Yazılıkaya, Public Sculpture, Sultan Han, Sultanhanı, Turkey, 2022; courtesy of the artist)
SaraNoa Mark (b. New York City, NY) pursues a drawing practice that investigates traces left by time, as they exist in landscapes and in collective memory. SaraNoa’s work has been supported by a Fulbright research fellowship in Turkey. SaraNoa has received grants from Artadia, the Harpo Foundation, U.S. Embassy Mission Grants Program in Turkey, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art, John Anson Kittredge Fund, Illinois Arts Council, Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) Individual Artists Program, West Collection, and the Chicago Artists Coalition. SaraNoa has been an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Dieu Donné, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Monira Foundation, Chicago Artists Coalition, Montello Foundation, Wave Hill, Hyde Park Art Center, and the Bronx River Art Center. SaraNoa codirected the 4th Ward Project Space in Chicago from 2017 to 2023. Exhibitions of their work have taken place at Huxley-Parlour, London; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland; Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City; Dreamsong, Minneapolis; 5533, Istanbul; Daniel Faira Gallery, Toronto; and Bridge Projects, Los Angeles, among others. Mark’s work has been reviewed in NPR, Hyperallergic, ARTNEWS, BOMB Magazine, ArtAsiaPacific, and more.
Michael Rakowitz
Assyrian Empire GalleryAs part of his series The invisible enemy should not exist, Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz has collaborated with the ISAC Museum to create—using contemporary Middle Eastern newspaper clippings and Iraqi food packaging—a reappearance of a relief from the Northwest Palace at Kalhu (modern Nimrud, present day Iraq), destroyed by Isis in 2015. This installation, which unites a relief fragment from the ISAC Museum collections with Rakowitz’s reappearance of panel G-13, shows a scene carved repeatedly in Room G that depicts the Assyrian king taking part in ceremonial activities.
I wasn’t as devastated when they (ISIS) destroyed my house or when they killed some of my relatives because this is life — all of us die. But Nimrud was like a part of our family. This heritage was part of our lives, part of all of Iraq.
(The invisible enemy should not exist (Room G, Northwest Palace of Kalḫu), Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden, 2019; courtesy of the artist)
Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973, Long Island, NY) is an artist living and working in Chicago. His work has appeared in venues worldwide including dOCUMENTA (13), P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, Castello di Rivoli, the 16th Biennale of Sydney, the 10th and 14th Istanbul Biennials, Sharjah Biennial 8, Tirana Biennale, National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt, and Transmediale 05. He has had solo projects and exhibitions with Creative Time, Tate Modern in London, MCA Chicago, Lombard Freid Gallery in New York, Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and Kunstraum Innsbruck. He is the recipient of the 2018 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; a 2012 Tiffany Foundation Award; a 2008 Creative Capital Grant; a Sharjah Biennial Jury Award; a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Architecture and Environmental Structures; the 2003 Dena Foundation Award, and the 2002 Design 21 Grand Prix from UNESCO. He was awarded the Fourth Plinth commission in London’s Trafalgar Square, on view through 2020. A survey of his work is on view at Whitechapel Gallery in London and will travel to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Torino in 2019 and The Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai in 2020. Rakowitz is Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.
Joseph Lindon Smith
Persian GalleryJoseph Lindon Smith (1863–1950), an American artist renowned for his faithful renderings of archaeological subjects, created six monumental paintings at the site of Persepolis in 1935 at the invitation of ISAC founder James Henry Breasted. Accompanied by his wife, Corinna, Smith joined ISAC’s Persian Expedition for only six weeks, executing six paintings freehand using the dry-brush technique. This approach resulted in greater realism and was especially impactful for rendering the textured surface of the stone sculpture of the Apadana staircase reliefs. However, it allowed for only minimal revisions once the oil paint had been applied to the canvas. After finishing his work at Persepolis, Smith traveled first to Giza in Egypt (he was also a member of the joint Harvard University–Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition) and then to Chicago to deliver the paintings in person, altogether three landscape scenes and three to-scale portraits of sections of the Apadana staircase reliefs. Following a recent conservation project, three of the Persepolis paintings have been installed for long-term display on the upper walls of the Persian Gallery.
Their conservation and exhibition has been made possible by a principal gift from the Ashtiani-Bonebrake Family. This project also benefited from the encouragement and support of Smith’s granddaughter, Linden Gaspar, and her husband, Charles J. Gaspar.
Persepolis paintings perfectly glorious and certainly mark culminating point of his career... the whole project has been in every way a great success.
