Casey Kaplan
A Subtle Benediction: Igshaan Adams’ Al Latîf
A review by Kopano Maroga
23 February 2018
Gallery spaces are strange vestibules. Sites that mark both a violent history of displacement and beauteous escape. Monuments to the multifarious contradictions that comprise humanity. blank projects, with its position in Woodstock in Cape Town – an historically working class suburb and now a working example of the disastrous effects of gentrification on the lives of poor and working class people of colour – serves as an incisive example of the complex and contradictory socio-political history of Cape Town. Moreso with the exhibition of Igshaan Adams’s latest body of work, Al Latîf, on display. Adams being an artist who comprises multiple intersections of post-colonial South African identity, and who subtly infuses these identities into his process based work through rigorously and expertly crafted formalist representations. And, much like the socio-political landscape that the exhibition is surrounded by, the devil is in the detail: stille water, diepe grond.[1]
Al Latîf is one of the 99 Beautiful Names of God in Islamic tradition. It can be translated as “the Subtle One”: a single benedictory invocation paying testament to the multiplicities of the divine within a cosmos of invocations. Examples of these invocations include: al-Halim, the Forbearing; al-Khabir, the All-Aware; al-Azim, the Magnificent. This semantic tradition of utilising multiple threads to refer to a single tapestry acts as a beautiful metaphor when counterposed with Adams’ work. In Al Latîf, Adams invites us to look closer, to appreciate the ethereal forms rendered through arduous amounts of labour. As though each separate piece of the exhibition were a bead on a rosary; perhaps an allegory on process as prayer.