Igshaan Adams’s hand-woven installations and tapestries address complex personal and communal histories that reflect his identity as a queer person of mixed race and religion (born Muslim yet raised in a Christian home) and growing up in Bonteheuwel, a racially segregated part of Cape Town during apartheid. Space of Togetherness brings together a selection of his earlier works and a new commission that will evolve during the duration of the show, activating the exhibition space. This performative aspect of his practice offers viewers a lens into his technique and method of working.
The performance is in consultation with Garage Dance Ensemble from O’okiep in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. It starts with a six-day workshop demonstrating the power of dance and movement to heal internal wounds. Directed by Adams, dancers from Cape Town—Jaime-Lee Hine, Lewellyn Regardt Afrika, Savannah Ashley Petrus, Zandile Salukazana, and Zanele Salukazana— together with local dancers Sofia Pouchtou, Elton Petri, and Candy Karra, leave painted traces of their bodies on inked-up canvases positioned on the linoleum floors.
In the negative space between these body prints Adams creates woven pathways using beads and colourful threads to reveal boundaries and borders, past and present. Through this weaving he creates a new entanglement of earlier histories—the linoleum floors of houses in Cape Town, Adams’s previous tapestries and ‘dust cloud’ works —and the energy and resilience of the body transcribed in the new body prints.