Igshaan Adams South African, b. 1982
Overview
Igshaan Adams 'Dark comfort (i)', 2024, Cotton twine, cotton fabric, polyester braided rope, plastic beads and tiger tail wire, 276 x 186 cm.
Igshaan Adams’s practice coalesces performance, weaving, sculpture and installation. Born in Bonteheuwel, a suburb in Cape Town, South Africa, Adams draws upon his background to contest racial, sexual and religious boundaries. This intersectional topography remains visible throughout his practice and serves as a palimpsest upon which traces of personal histories are inscribed and reinscribed. He explains; “I’m interested in the personal stories recorded on the surface. What is recorded is not necessarily always a factual account but can be what is imagined - a combination of myth-making and meaning-making”.
Adams approaches materiality through his own subjectivity. Often, cultural and religious references are used in conjunction with surfaces that have always been present throughout his life; thread, beads, wire, linoleum, cotton twine, fabric. His interest in the material oscillates between the intuitive process of handling different substances as well as a formal inquiry into how various materials behave in different contexts and how they transfigure or evolve depending. Likening the material’s potential for evolution to his own potential for evolution, Adams is engaged in broadening his ideas of selfhood in an ongoing process of covering and uncovering, doing and undoing.
Biography
Portrait of Igshaan Adams. Photography by Mario Todeschini. Courtesy of the artist.
To date, Adams has held solo exhibitions at Hill Art Foundation (New York), ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (Denmark), The Hepworth Wakefield (England), Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago, Kunsthalle Zurich, Hayward Gallery (London), SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah), Akershus Kunstsenter (Oslo), and Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town), among others. He has also participated in numerous international group shows, including Recipes for Broken Hearts at the Bukhara Biennial in Uzbekistan (2025); Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st Century Art and Poetics at LACMA (2025); Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at Barbican Centre London (2024) and The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2024); Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstractions at LACMA, National Gallery of Art DC, National Gallery of Canada and Museum of Modern Art (2023-2025); Choreographies of the Impossible, the São Paulo Biennale (2023); Awwal Bayt, the Islamic Arts Biennale (2023) in Jeddah, and The Milk of Dreams (2022) at the Venice Biennale.
Adams has been selected for a number of artist residencies including the Atelier residency at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town, the Sommerakademie im Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, and the IAAB Pro Helvetia residency in Basel. In 2018, Adams was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art.
His works are included in numerous public collections, including the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (Aarhus, Denmark), Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), Speed Art Museum (Kentucky, USA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, USA), CA Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA), Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden), Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, USA), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Tate Modern (London, UK), Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, USA), Inhotim Museum (Brazil), Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town, South Africa), Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, USA), Standard Bank collection (Johannesburg, South Africa) and University of Cape Town collection (Cape Town, South Africa).