Igshaan Adams: Primêre Wentelbaan
Thomas Dane Gallery, London has extended Primêre Wentelbaan, the gallery’s first exhibition with Igshaan Adams (b.1982, Cape Town) to 20 December 2023.
Adams’s cross-disciplinary practice combines weaving, sculpture, performance and installation to explore ideas of personal and political history, race, religion and sexuality. Adams’s densely crafted work brings together cultural and religious references which map and mark his own history: the geometric patterns of linoleum floors found throughout the homes of friends and neighbours, the geographical and socio-political terrain of his environment, and the material and iconographies of Islam.
Image: Installation view, Igshaan Adams, Primêre Wentelbaan, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 11 October–20 December 2023. © Igshaan Adams. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and blank projects. Photo: Ben Westoby. Image above: Igshaan Adams, Kyk tweekeer vir die karre voor julle kruis!, 2023 (detail). © Igshaan Adams. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and blank projects. Photo: Ben Westoby.
Primêre Wentelbaan is an expansion of Adams’s body of work exploring ‘desire lines’ – pathways of unofficial routes gradually worn over time by repeated pedestrian travel. Throughout the Apartheid era such pathways were used to connect segregated communities that were forcibly separated by man-made boundaries, highways and open ground, physically and economically excluding communities of colour. To Adams these ‘desire lines’ represent more than journeys borne of necessity or convenience, but freedom and transgression against deeply enforced and oppressive structures. Working with satellite imagery to create drawings that trace these pathways, Adams invites us to witness them from above, making visible collective histories of resistance, desire and struggle, and transforming them into sites of agency.
Image: Igshaan Adams, Kyk tweekeer vir die karre voor julle kruis!, 2023 (detail). © Igshaan Adams. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and blank projects. Photo: Ben Westoby.
Growing up in this acutely challenging environment, against which Adams held a multifaceted racial, religious and sexual identity, the desire lines have a very personal resonance for him: “I have often wondered about the first person who decided to take a shortcut, paving the way for others to follow. I feel a kinship with them, having grown up in an environment where there were no artists, no one to create a path for me.”
The works in Primêre Wentelbaan look at three adjoining locations across Bonteheuwel where Adams lived, and the neighbouring Heideveld where his aunts lived. The townships are separated by the N2 Highway (previously known as Settlers Way) and Adams traversed these sites in his immediate environment with his brother and friends as he grew from childhood to adolescence and his sense of self was formed. The wall-hung tapestry, Aan die anderkant van die blou veld hoor ek haar lag [on the other side of the blue field I hear her laugh] (2023), and the floor work, Kyk tweekeer vir die karre voor julle kruis! [check twice for the cars before you cross!] (2023), are connected by absences: pathways that cross the works and chart the movement of people between them. Alongside these works, a confronting, dark diptych, hanging almost floor to ceiling, shimmers like an enveloping night sky: Sterverligte paadjie huis toe [starlit path home] (2023) draws from an open, liminal space surrounded by highways in Heideveld.
Adams’s pieces are densely worked with many layers of mediation from the initial satellite views and drawings, reworking the cartoons through digital manipulation, weaving, binding, dying, making and unmaking, introducing material collage and a bold colour way – a departure from the muted earth tones with which we are more familiar. Here the palette is brighter and more exaggerated: saturated shades of pink, turquoise and cadmium red, contrasting with inky blackness evoke a sense of child-like wonder and a nostalgia which Adams considers “a yearning for the beauty and fantasy of what could have been if my environment had allowed for it – forcing a wish onto a memory.”
Rather than reducing these spaces to a single dimension, they are sites that unfold along various personal, social and political lines. Adams holds this overlapping nature simultaneously: Primêre Wentelbaan looks at these sites as a place of childhood enchantment and familial ties, and as a site of state-sanctioned racism and generational trauma, reflecting on the complexities of navigating queer desire in a hyper masculine space within a very conservative culture.
Image: Igshaan Adams, Aan die anderkant van die blou veld hoor ek haar lag, 2023 (detail). © Igshaan Adams. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and blank projects. Photo: Mario Todeschini.
Since his earliest works using found-object linoleum floors (or tapyts), later recreating their designs, patterns and wear through layers of intervention, Adams has been interested in objects and places as sites of memory and origin. In Primêre Wentelbaan he considers what it means to leave a primary environment behind as a point of origin, and the particular feeling of alienation when returning to these familiar places with an expanded worldview, whilst also grappling with how these environments conditioned and shaped him. The work explores these shifting perspectives. As Adams says, “ultimately, to question these primary points of view is to discover other paths.”
Image: Installation view, Igshaan Adams, Primêre Wentelbaan, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 11 October–20 December 2023. © Igshaan Adams. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and blank projects. Photo: Ben Westoby.
Suspended above and throughout the space are golden and pigmented twisting wire installations which Adams refers to as ‘clouds’, which in part draw inspiration from dust clouds created in the rieldans (a traditional dance of courtship from the Northern Cape) borne upwards as the dancers’ feet pound on the dusty earth. The rich physicality of the weavings and the ephemerality of the glinting, shimmering clouds are held in tension with one another, transforming these charged spaces against an uplifting sign of collective joy and freedom.
Igshaan Adams: Primêre Wentelbaan is on show at Thomas Dane Gallery until 20 December. Find out more:
www.thomasdanegallery.com
Adams’s cross-disciplinary practice combines weaving, sculpture, performance and installation to explore ideas of personal and political history, race, religion and sexuality. Adams’s densely crafted work brings together cultural and religious references which map and mark his own history: the geometric patterns of linoleum floors found throughout the homes of friends and neighbours, the geographical and socio-political terrain of his environment, and the material and iconographies of Islam.
Image: Installation view, Igshaan Adams, Primêre Wentelbaan, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 11 October–20 December 2023. © Igshaan Adams. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and blank projects. Photo: Ben Westoby. Image above: Igshaan Adams, Kyk tweekeer vir die karre voor julle kruis!, 2023 (detail). © Igshaan Adams. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and blank projects. Photo: Ben Westoby.
For the exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery, Adams presents three large-scale tapestries and hanging ‘cloud’ sculptures, conceived as an interconnected installation across the gallery walls and floor. The work reflects on the psycho-geographical environment, geopolitical context and sites of memory of his childhood in Bonteheuwel, a working-class segregated township on the Cape Flats southeast of Cape Town, founded as a so-called Coloured district in the 1957 Group Areas Act. Made using quotidian materials such as beads, rope, wire, glass and shells, these intensely intricate works elevate the material aspects of lived spaces and illuminate the personal and political histories and stories that they hold. The title ‘Primêre Wentelbaan’ [Primary Orbit] alludes to the sites into which Adams first ventured as a child and adolescent, and serves as a way for Adams to think about how his early environment shaped his world-view.
Image: Igshaan Adams, Kyk tweekeer vir die karre voor julle kruis!, 2023 (detail). © Igshaan Adams. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and blank projects. Photo: Ben Westoby.
Growing up in this acutely challenging environment, against which Adams held a multifaceted racial, religious and sexual identity, the desire lines have a very personal resonance for him: “I have often wondered about the first person who decided to take a shortcut, paving the way for others to follow. I feel a kinship with them, having grown up in an environment where there were no artists, no one to create a path for me.”
The works in Primêre Wentelbaan look at three adjoining locations across Bonteheuwel where Adams lived, and the neighbouring Heideveld where his aunts lived. The townships are separated by the N2 Highway (previously known as Settlers Way) and Adams traversed these sites in his immediate environment with his brother and friends as he grew from childhood to adolescence and his sense of self was formed. The wall-hung tapestry, Aan die anderkant van die blou veld hoor ek haar lag [on the other side of the blue field I hear her laugh] (2023), and the floor work, Kyk tweekeer vir die karre voor julle kruis! [check twice for the cars before you cross!] (2023), are connected by absences: pathways that cross the works and chart the movement of people between them. Alongside these works, a confronting, dark diptych, hanging almost floor to ceiling, shimmers like an enveloping night sky: Sterverligte paadjie huis toe [starlit path home] (2023) draws from an open, liminal space surrounded by highways in Heideveld.
Adams’s pieces are densely worked with many layers of mediation from the initial satellite views and drawings, reworking the cartoons through digital manipulation, weaving, binding, dying, making and unmaking, introducing material collage and a bold colour way – a departure from the muted earth tones with which we are more familiar. Here the palette is brighter and more exaggerated: saturated shades of pink, turquoise and cadmium red, contrasting with inky blackness evoke a sense of child-like wonder and a nostalgia which Adams considers “a yearning for the beauty and fantasy of what could have been if my environment had allowed for it – forcing a wish onto a memory.”
Rather than reducing these spaces to a single dimension, they are sites that unfold along various personal, social and political lines. Adams holds this overlapping nature simultaneously: Primêre Wentelbaan looks at these sites as a place of childhood enchantment and familial ties, and as a site of state-sanctioned racism and generational trauma, reflecting on the complexities of navigating queer desire in a hyper masculine space within a very conservative culture.
Image: Igshaan Adams, Aan die anderkant van die blou veld hoor ek haar lag, 2023 (detail). © Igshaan Adams. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and blank projects. Photo: Mario Todeschini.
Since his earliest works using found-object linoleum floors (or tapyts), later recreating their designs, patterns and wear through layers of intervention, Adams has been interested in objects and places as sites of memory and origin. In Primêre Wentelbaan he considers what it means to leave a primary environment behind as a point of origin, and the particular feeling of alienation when returning to these familiar places with an expanded worldview, whilst also grappling with how these environments conditioned and shaped him. The work explores these shifting perspectives. As Adams says, “ultimately, to question these primary points of view is to discover other paths.”
Image: Installation view, Igshaan Adams, Primêre Wentelbaan, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 11 October–20 December 2023. © Igshaan Adams. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and blank projects. Photo: Ben Westoby.
Suspended above and throughout the space are golden and pigmented twisting wire installations which Adams refers to as ‘clouds’, which in part draw inspiration from dust clouds created in the rieldans (a traditional dance of courtship from the Northern Cape) borne upwards as the dancers’ feet pound on the dusty earth. The rich physicality of the weavings and the ephemerality of the glinting, shimmering clouds are held in tension with one another, transforming these charged spaces against an uplifting sign of collective joy and freedom.
Igshaan Adams: Primêre Wentelbaan is on show at Thomas Dane Gallery until 20 December. Find out more:
www.thomasdanegallery.com