Casey Kaplan
Beaded Affairs: Igshaan Adams
by Rahel Aima
“Warp and weft are recast as latitude and longitude in Igshaan Adams’s woven works. The South African artist is best known for his hanging sculptures, the most recent of which resemble aerial topographic maps of land, water bodies, and trees. But his practice also spans installations and performances that negotiate various Muslim rituals (for instance funerary rites of cleansing and wrapping the body) as well as the legacies of apartheid. They hone in on a particular set of coordinates with the accuracy of an eyebrow threader zeroing in on a single hair.
The place is South Africa, where the mixed-race Adams grew up as a colored person, as classified under apartheid’s juridico-legal system. His experience of racial segregation intersects with his background as a queer, practicing Muslim. Born to Christian and Muslim parents, he was raised by Christian grandparents who were nevertheless supportive of his faith. Negotiating these conflicting identities didn’t come easily, and Adams would leave Islam before later returning to the religion. Importantly, it’s not a contradiction so much as a point of departure to unspool the twinned constructions of both his personal identity and the society around him.
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