LONDON.- Thomas Dane Gallery, London, is now presenting Primêre Wentelbaan, the gallery’s first exhibition with Igshaan Adams (b.1982, Cape Town). Adams’s cross-disciplinary practice combines weaving, sculpture, performance and installation to explore ideas of personal and political history, race, religion and sexuality. Adams’s densely crafted work brings together cultural and religious references which map and mark his own history: the geometric patterns of linoleum floors found throughout the homes of friends and neighbours, the geographical and socio-political terrain of his environment, and the material and iconographies of Islam.
For the exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery, Adams presents three large-scale tapestries and hanging ‘cloud’ sculptures, conceived as an interconnected installation across the gallery walls and floor. The work reflects on the psycho-geographical environment, geopolitical context and sites of memory of his childhood in Bonteheuwel, a working-class segregated township on the Cape Flats southeast of Cape Town, founded as a so-called Coloured district in the 1957 Group Areas Act. Made using quotidian materials such as beads, rope, wire, glass and shells, these intensely intricate works elevate the material aspects of lived spaces and illuminate the personal and political histories and stories that they hold. The title ‘Primêre Wentelbaan’ [Primary Orbit] alludes to the sites into which Adams first ventured as a child and adolescent, and serves as a way for Adams to think about how his early environment shaped his world-view.
Primêre Wentelbaan is an expansion of Adams’s body of work exploring ‘desire lines’ – pathways of unofficial routes gradually worn over time by repeated pedestrian travel. Throughout the Apartheid era such pathways were used to connect segregated communities that were forcibly separated by man-made boundaries, highways and open ground, physically and economically excluding communities of colour. To Adams these ‘desire lines’ represent more than journeys borne of necessity or convenience, but freedom and transgression against deeply enforced and oppressive structures. Working with satellite imagery to create drawings that trace these pathways, Adams invites us to witness them from above, making visible collective histories of resistance, desire and struggle, and transforming them into sites of agency.
Growing up in this acutely challenging environment, against which Adams held a multifaceted racial, religious and sexual identity, the desire lines have a very personal resonance for him: “I have often wondered about the first person who decided to take a shortcut, paving the way for others to follow. I feel a kinship with them, having grown up in an environment where there were no artists, no one to create a path for me.”
The worksin Primêre Wentelbaan lookat three adjoining locations across Bonteheuwel where Adams lived, and the neighbouring Heideveld where his aunts lived. The townships are separated by the N2 Highway (previously known as Settlers Way) and Adams traversed these sites in his immediate environment with his brother and friends as he grew from childhood to adolescence and his sense of self was formed. The wall-hung tapestry, Aan die anderkant van die blou veld hoor ek haar lag [on the other side of the blue field I hear her laugh] (2023), and the floor work, Kyk tweekeer vir die karre voor julle kruis! [check twice for the cars before you cross!] (2023), are connected by absences: pathways that cross the works and chart the movement of people between them. At the far end of the gallery, a confronting, dark diptych, hanging almost floor to ceiling, shimmers like an enveloping night sky: Sterverligte paadjie huis toe [starlit path home] (2023) draws from an open, liminal space surrounded by highways in Heideveld.
Adams’s pieces are densely worked with many layers of mediation from the initial satellite views and drawings, reworking the cartoons through digital manipulation, weaving, binding, dying, making and unmaking, introducing material collage and a bold colour way – a departure from the muted earth tones with which we are more familiar. Here the palette is brighter and more exaggerated: saturated shades of pink, turquoise and cadmium red, contrasting with inky blackness evoke a sense of child-like wonder and a nostalgia which Adams considers “a yearning for the beauty and fantasy of what could have been if my environment had allowed for it – forcing a wish onto a memory.”
Rather than reducing these spaces to a single dimension, they are sites that unfold along various personal, social and political lines. Adams holds this overlapping nature simultaneously: Primêre Wentelbaan looks at these sites as a place of childhood enchantment and familial ties, and as a site of state-sanctioned racism and generational trauma, reflecting on the complexities of navigating queer desire in a hyper masculine space within a very conservative culture.
Since his earliest works using found-object linoleum floors (or tapyts), later recreating their designs, patterns and wear through layers of intervention, Adams has been interested in objects and places as sites of memory and origin. In Primêre Wentelbaan he considers what it means to leave a primary environment behind as a point of origin, and the particular feeling of alienation when returning to these familiar places with an expanded worldview, whilst also grappling with how these environments conditioned and shaped him. The work explores these shifting perspectives. As Adams says, “ultimately, to question these primary points of view is to discover other paths.”
Suspended above and throughout the space are golden and pigmented twisting wire installations which Adams refers to as ‘clouds’, which in part draw inspiration from dust clouds created in the rieldans (a traditional dance of courtship from the Northern Cape) borne upwards as the dancers’ feet pound on the dusty earth. The rich physicality of the weavings and the ephemerality of the glinting, shimmering clouds are held in tension with one another, transforming these charged spaces against an uplifting sign of collective joy and freedom.
Concurrently with the Thomas Dane Gallery exhibition, Adams presents a major new commission as part of the 35th São Paulo Biennial, choreographies of the impossible (6 September–10 December 2023), curated by Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes and Manuel Borja-Villel.
Adams participated in the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, 2022, curated by Cecilia Alemani, and recently as part of the Islamic Arts Biennale 2023 in Jeddah. Major solo exhibitions of Adams’ work have been held at The Art Institute of Chicago (2022); Kunsthalle Zürich (2022); Hayward Gallery, London (2021); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2020); Akershus Kunstsenter, Oslo (2019); and The Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2018). His work is included in the public collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; The Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Inhotim Museum, Brazil; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Standard Bank collection, Johannesburg; and the University of Cape Town.
Thomas Dane Gallery
Igshaan Adams: Primêre Wentelbaan
October 11th, 2023 - December 16th, 2023
