Hayward Gallery presents Igshaan Adams: Kicking Dust, the first solo exhibition in the UK of South African artist Igshaan Adams. The exhibition will then travel to Kunsthalle Zürich in February 2022. The cross-disciplinary textile artist is known for creating work that combines weaving, sculpture, and installation in layered narratives that explore race, religion, and sexuality.
Adams has developed a body of work that draws on his experience as a queer Muslim growing up in apartheid-era South Africa. His intricate textile works are made with an array of both natural and synthetic materials, including rope, twine, copper wire, silk, wood, bone, glass, and plastic beading. The artist’s work also draws on the iconography and principles of Sufism (a mystical form of Islam that emphasizes the importance of the ‘inner self’ in the search for God), which he uses to navigate the relationship between his sexuality and faith.
The title of the exhibition references the “Rieldans,” one of the oldest indigenous dance styles of the Northern Cape. The dancers move with such vivacity that it looks as though they are playing in the dust. The cloud-like sculptures suspended from the gallery’s ceiling resonate with the image of dust erupting from the earth as dancers kick the ground.
The overall exhibition, according to the artist, “centers around the idea of the imprints that we collectively leave behind as we move through spaces, both private and public.” Building on this sense of movement and of journeying, the artist has created pathways through the gallery with the placement of his floor weavings based on field research, as well as satellite imagery, that he collected of “desire lines” in the suburbs of Cape Town. Similar to a dirt track or a path that cuts across a field, desire lines are the improvised footpaths that pedestrians take intuitively rather than following a set route. For Adams, these paths are human traces in a landscape that represent both freedom and transgression. This sense of ‘desire’ comes across strongly in Adams’ practice as he seeks to liberate himself from homogenous constructs of identity.
Hayward Gallery has over fifty years of experience working with internationally-renowned contemporary artists. To mark the opening of Igshaan Adams: Kicking Dust, Hayward Gallery invited poet, writer, and artist Victoria Adukwei Bulley to write a creative response to Adams’ arresting body of work.
Until the Fabric Speaks & the Textile is a Text
If you fall into it
it will catch you, the way
it caught everything you lost
as a child. Silver thread
of cloud. Gold earring,
bright & worldly things
with their polymer onwardness,
a willingness not to decay.
Tell me, I said, about what has survived.
Tell it with only two threads & your
hands
swimming over & under
& over again, until the fabric
speaks & the textile is a text –
warp:
what reminds us of love
is worth keeping
weft:
all your failed experiments
might yet be of use.
to touch your brow to the ground knowing
this.
Igshaan Adams: Kicking Dust is on display until 25 July 2021 at Hayward Gallery and 5 February - 22 May 2022 at Kunsthalle Zürich.
Tickets are available online at the Southbank Centre here. Information on the exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich can be found here.
Curated by Tarini Malik (Hayward Gallery) and Daniel Baumann (Kunsthalle Zürich)