Casey Kaplan
Art and Design
Art That Finds Clarity in South Africa’s Fraught Terrain
Igshaan Adams and Bronwyn Katz use abstraction and humble materials to make sense of their country at the Venice Biennale.
By Siddhartha Mitter | Published April 28, 2022 | Updated May 3, 2022
CHICAGO — On a recent afternoon, the artist Igshaan Adams instructed me to pull up Cape Town on Google Earth on my phone. We thumbed away from the waterfront and the verdant enclaves that hug the iconic Table Mountain, and over to the sprawling Cape Flats, all dusty brown.
This was where the apartheid regime forcibly relocated nonwhite people into commuter suburbs, designated by race. Adams, who is “Coloured” by that rubric — a holdover term that remains widely employed as a cultural designation for South Africa’s mixed-race communities — grew up in a place called Bonteheuwel.
We found his block, low houses cheek by jowl. Across the tracks lay Epping, a big industrial zone of factories and hangars. In between was open land. We zoomed in and saw them: the paths formed by people trekking between the two zones.
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