in situ: Igshaan Adams. Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive

Igshaan Adams (b. 1982, Cape Town) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice interweaves the personal and the political through materials, gesture, and form. Drawing inspiration from his childhood in Bonteheuwel—a community marked hy the divisions of Apartheid Adams transforms humble materials, such as rope, beads, and wire into complex compositions exploring the interconnections between race, religion, sexuality, and memory. He often takes as starting point of his practice the patterned linoleum floors of domestic interiors and translates those familiar geometries into abstractions that condense both intimacy and uprootedness. Adams has recently expanded his research to encompass, to a greater extent, the realm of movement. His collaboration with Garage Dance Ensemble in O’okiep, in South Africa’s Northern Cape province—the ancestral home of his mother’s family—has opened a new dialogue between weaving and dance. Through workshops with dancers, Adams devised a process in which the bodies move across canvases placed over the painted linoleum floors, creating “dance traces” that record collective gestures of liberation and connection. These traces, superimposed throughout successive performances, function as visual scores of the encounter: traces of the attempts to “release accumulated and sedimented psychic imprints,” as the artist himself described them.

The pieces that will be presented at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao originated from performances held in Athens in 2024, whose monotypes have been transformed into a number of large-scale woven tapestries, suspended in space to allow the viewer to move around and between them. Some hang from hooks Some hang from hooks that curve the piece outward, revealing both sides of the tapestry; others are accompanied by small woven “clouds,” as if they were fragments of color and movement which had broken free and were floating in the air. At once playful and solemn, Adams’s installation gives shape to invisible forces—memory, rhythm, empathy—and proposes the act of weaving as a bodily, communal practice of healing.