Casey Kaplan
Artist Igshaan Adams Stitches Together The Sacred And The Ordinary
Winner Of The 2018 Standard Bank Young Artist Award For Visual Art, Adams Plays Complex Games With The Material And Spiritual
By Graham Wood
20 August 2018
There is a little leaflet in the catalogue for Igshaan Adams’s exhibition now on at the Standard Bank Gallery. It slips out from the between the pages as you flip through it, providing “book handling instructions.”
“This book should be handled in a similar manner to the Qur’an, or other consecrated texts,” it reads. When not in use, it should be wrapped (it comes bound in cloth) and placed on the highest shelf in the house; never on the floor.
It’s a provocation that comes as a bit of a shock. Apart from being on the sacrilegious side, it takes hubris to tell the world your exhibition catalogue should be treated as sacred, even if you have just won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award. But, despite the jolt of danger and suspicion it might deliver at first, the catalogue is a pretty good way into an exhibition that relies as much on what its artworks don’t tell you as what they do.
Artist Igshaan Adams Stitches Together The Sacred And The Ordinary
Winner Of The 2018 Standard Bank Young Artist Award For Visual Art, Adams Plays Complex Games With The Material And Spiritual
By Graham Wood
20 August 2018
There is a little leaflet in the catalogue for Igshaan Adams’s exhibition now on at the Standard Bank Gallery. It slips out from the between the pages as you flip through it, providing “book handling instructions.”
“This book should be handled in a similar manner to the Qur’an, or other consecrated texts,” it reads. When not in use, it should be wrapped (it comes bound in cloth) and placed on the highest shelf in the house; never on the floor.
It’s a provocation that comes as a bit of a shock. Apart from being on the sacrilegious side, it takes hubris to tell the world your exhibition catalogue should be treated as sacred, even if you have just won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award. But, despite the jolt of danger and suspicion it might deliver at first, the catalogue is a pretty good way into an exhibition that relies as much on what its artworks don’t tell you as what they do.