Igshaan Adams

Igshaan Adams’s practice coalesces performance, weaving, sculpture and installation. Born in Bonteheuwel, a township 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. He explains; “I’m interested in the personal stories recorded on the surface. What is recorded is not necessarily always a factual account but can be what is imagined - a combination of myth-making and meaning-making”. Adams approaches materiality through his own subjectivity. Often, cultural and religious references are used in conjunction with surfaces that have always been present throughout his life; thread, beads, wire, linoleum, cotton twine, fabric. His interest in the material oscillates between the intuitive process of handling different substances as well as a formal inquiry into how various materials behave in different contexts and how they transfigure or evolve depending. Likening the material’s potential for evolution to his own potential for evolution, Adams is engaged in broadening his ideas of selfhood in an ongoing process of covering and uncovering, doing and undoing. ...

Public is a contemporary art gallery in East London with a diverse international programme focused on emerging artists.