For 'Dark comfort (i)' (2024), Adams returns to the personal, collaborating with the 'Garage Dance Ensemble' — a collective based in O’Kiep, in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, where the artist has ancestral roots. The dancers are encouraged to intuitively interact and improvise with a large canvas laid over freshly painted linoleum, leaving behind traces of their movements and creating abstract gestures with their bodies. The resulting “paintings” become motifs for his woven tapestries. Adams considers the dancers’ bodies and movements as repositories of memory and trauma, recording in his textiles the trace of their collective psyche. He understands “movement as a medium through which one can mend internal brokenness, even when clarity or memory is lacking.”

BIOGRAPHY

Igshaan Adams (b. 1982, Cape Town, South Africa) 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. His works are included in numerous public collections, including the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (Aarhus, Denmark), Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, USA), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA), 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).