Igshaan Adams: A Body of Work

| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 During a talk on his 2022 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, South African artist Igshaan Adams was told by an attendee that many children felt the urge to touch his work: “it’s so interactive and your body feels like dancing” (Adams and Folkerts 2022b: n.p.). Younger viewers, less concerned with posturing at a museum, often respond to artwork with their bodies, a reaction Adams’s oeuvre seems to particularly evoke. I cannot blame them. My first face-to-face encounter with his work sparked a rare sense of awe toward its luxurious sensorial quality. Edmund Husserl writes that “[a] subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not at all have an appearing body” (Husserl 1989: 158). Touch is a necessary sense for our experience of the body and its image, which is why children’s tactile impulse around Adams’s work is an obvious response to an oeuvre in which embodiment is everywhere to be found. “Touch localizes us in the world in a way that seeing does not,” explains Dermot Moran (2010: 138). No wonder, then, that the prospect of touching the work makes the children want to dance. Adams’s installations and tapestries— works made of mundane materials like plastic beads, wires, and nylon—exude a liveliness that seems palpable. Handwoven using a detailed and time-consuming practice, the artist’s work spurs a tension between the bodies of its producers, the artist and his studio assistants, and the bodies of the viewers. The tension emerges from the potential of these interactions to produce new meanings mediated by the work but not predetermined by it.1 For the young children, tension arises from the conflicting impulses to maintain the expected position of distant viewing and the temptation to break that norm. Adams, who was the 2018 recipient of the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist award, was born in 1982 and raised in Bonteheuwel, a township at the periphery of Cape Town in an area known as the Cape Flats.2 The child of a Christian Nama-Khoisan woman and a Muslim man, he grew up identified as “Cape Malay” under apartheid’s racial classification system.3 Perhaps due to his multicultural upbringing under segregation, he has shown a keen sensibility to the violence of confinement and categorization, investing instead in experimentation, expansion, and diffusion as the modus operandi of his practice. When asked about children’s interest in touching his works, he responded, “if it was my studio, I would say ‘touch as much as you want’” (Adams and Folkerts 2022b: n.p.). Bonteheuwel/Epping (2021; Figs. 1–2), which was on display at the 2022 Venice Biennale, captures an aerial view of Bonteheuwel’s train station and its informal foot trails to Epping, an industrial neighborhood where many go to seek work. Known in urbanism as “desire lines,” these spontaneous means of connecting areas designed to be apart create an anarchist relationship to space. They are informal paths that developed without infrastructure, shaped by the local population’s continual walking of routes that escape official efforts to condition movement. Unofficial and informal means of movement are particularly poignant in the aftermath of apartheid, which sought to subject all aspects of life to its racialized renderings of space. The desire lines in Adams’s work testify to the resistance to official geography and its long-lasting enforcement of class exploitation through racial segregation, in this case by making decent employment harder to access for the predominantly Coloured inhabitants of Bonteheuwel.4 His desire lines speak to more than just a strictly urbanist definition; they also convey what Nick Shepard and Noëleen Murray call