Casey Kaplan
Islamic Tradition Meets Post-Apartheid Identity In Igshaan Adams’ Intricate Tapestries
By Emily Rappaport
15 June 2015
Last year, in a performance called “Bismillah” at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, Igshaan Adams asked his father to bathe him and shroud him in three layers of cloth. In Islamic funereal tradition, this ritual takes place prior to burial, and the elder Adams tended to the younger one as he would to the dead. The 32-year-old South African artist has what he calls a “difficult history” with his dad, who suffered from addiction and had abusive tendencies when Adams was growing up. Their collaboration, in which the father washes and clothes the son, is a purifying act of paternal care and intimacy that nevertheless acknowledges serious filial suffering, exemplified by Adams’s symbolic death.