Casey Kaplan
COLLECTIVE LIMITATIONS: IGSHAAN ADAMS’ “WHEN DUST SETTLES”
By Themba Tsotsi
31 October 2018
Since Igshaan Adams has been announced Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year, his work is even more prominent in his native South Africa. With an exhibition that highlights his approaches towards performance, weaving, sculpture, and installation he currently red- flags issues around race, religion, and sexuality. In “When Dust Settles” his perspective as a gay liberal Muslim reflects the complex situation of so many in the country who experience marginalization on a daily basis.
Igshaan Adams won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2018. Currently his body of work is touring the country and was exhibited at the South African National Gallery. “When Dust Settles” is a collection of works that continue the tapestry motif of his work, a recurring theme encompassing the entire exhibition. An exhibition that continues to explore issues of colored identity and religion by incorporating the Muslim practice of Wudu as symbolic for a sense of purity and self-realization that comes with interacting with one’s environment.
Anchored by a strong spiritual aspect, Adams’ work delves into the fringes of collective discourse by subsuming what is symbolic about daily life and translating that into the exhibition space. This can be discerned in the curatorial choice to inundate the gallery space with vinyl flooring, which covers not only the floor but also the walls and some of the ceiling. Vinyl flooring is a staple in low-income and working class communities in South Africa, a strategy that adds a facility for cleanliness and purity. So in the exhibition it operates as a narrative foundation for what is static about the personal histories and lived experiences of the communities Adams’ work discourses.
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