Casey Kaplan
in situ: Igshaan Adams. Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive is open through November 1, 2026 at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
Adams’ work brings together performance, weaving, sculpture and installation to explore and unsettle racial, sexual and religious boundaries. Born in Bonteheuwel, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, he draws on his lived experience to create works that function as palimpsests, where personal histories are layered, obscured and reinscribed. Densely crafted and materially rich, they draw together cultural and spiritual references that trace both intimate memory and wider socio-political realities. As Adams has said, “I am interested in the personal stories recorded on the surface. What is recorded is not necessarily always a factual account but can be what is imagined, a combination of myth-making and meaning-making.”
The works presented at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, developed through Adams’ collaboration with Garage Dance Ensemble in O’okiep (Northern Cape, South Africa), originated from performances staged in 2024 during a residency and exhibition at NEON in Athens. Emerging from his ongoing dialogue between weaving and dance, they began with dancers moving across canvases laid over painted linoleum floors, leaving behind layered traces of gesture, rhythm and release. At the Guggenheim, these traces are translated into large-scale woven tapestries suspended in space and accompanied by smaller woven ‘clouds’, giving form to memory and movement, and proposing weaving as a bodily, communal practice of healing.
Curated by Lekha Hileman.
For more information, please visit the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s website.