Raafat Ishak’s Organisation for Future of Good Steps, a giant, white, half-turn staircase hovering seven metres above the ground, straddles the east and west walls of inner city Melbourne’s Niagara Lane. Commissioned as part of the City of Melbourne’s Laneway Commissions 2008, Organisation for Future of Good Steps is a curious statement that sits uncomfortably beside the offices, warehouses, shops and restaurants of the central business district. Manufactured from lightweight steel, this staircase is both familiar and incomplete. Reminiscent of exterior staircases often added to older buildings to address fire regulations—probably more ubiquitous in our images of Brooklyn and Harlem than Melbourne—Ishak’s staircase is unsafe by design. Steps, handrails and parts of the landings have been cut out and components extraneous to the original form have been added. The staircase has been divested of its familiar and functional purpose and has no beginning or end. While clearly connecting two buildings, it is inaccessible from both.
Born in Cairo and arriving in Australia as a teenager, Ishak has produced a sustained independent and collaborative practice since the mid-1990s. His work explores the complex relationship between the personal and the political and speculates on the nature of government, statehood, national borders and identity, as well as ideas of home, belonging and citizenship. Ishak draws from an expansive and at times contradictory range of sources including logos, symbols, flags, buildings and art historical motifs. Over a period of time he has developed what D.J. Huppatz described, in an early essay on his work, as an archive or ‘personal system’ of icons that can be called upon, mixed together, and deconstructed to create paintings and sculptures that resonate on an individual as... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline