Igshaan Adams: Weaving the Body’s Archive
Igshaan Adams has long occupied a distinctive place in contemporary art through a practice that moves fluidly between weaving, sculpture, performance and installation. Born in Bonteheuwel, a township on the outskirts of Cape Town shaped by the spatial violence of apartheid, Adams draws deeply from personal experience to create works that challenge inherited ideas of race, sexuality and religion.
Igshaan Adams, Within Grid Lines, 2025. Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, and blank projects. © Igshaan Adams
His intricate surfaces act as palimpsests, carrying layers of memory that are concealed and revealed in equal measure. As the artist has reflected, “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.” For Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Adams extends this language into a new and deeply collaborative direction.
Developed with the Garage Dance Ensemble from O’okiep in South Africa’s Northern Cape, the works grew from a series of performances first staged during a 2024 residency at NEON in Athens (see video above). There, dancers moved across canvases spread over painted linoleum floors, leaving behind impressions of gesture, rhythm and release. These marks, created through the pressure and motion of bodies in space, became visual records of a shared experience. In bringing together performers from different cultural backgrounds, Adams also opened a space for dialogue between communities, allowing the body itself to become a vessel for memory, exchange and transformation.
Cloud V, 2019. Ishgaan Adams.
Adams has transformed those ephemeral traces into monumental woven tapestries that hang suspended throughout the gallery. Visitors can walk around and between the works, encountering them not simply as textiles but as living forms that hold the residue of movement. Some are curved outward from the wall, revealing both sides of the weave, while smaller woven “clouds” hover nearby as though fragments of colour and memory have drifted free from the larger compositions. The installation encourages a slower kind of looking, inviting viewers to consider how gesture can be preserved and how movement can linger long after the body has left the room.
Savannah (detail). Ishgaan Adams. Photo: Mario Todeschini
Material has always been central to Adams’s practice. Rope, beads, wire, cotton and thread are never simply decorative elements but carriers of cultural memory and emotional weight. In these new works, weaving becomes more than a method of making; it becomes an embodied act, translating movement into form and transforming private histories into communal reflection. The tactile density of the surfaces invites close attention, while the scale of the installation creates a powerful physical encounter. Familiar domestic materials are elevated into something sacred, suggesting that ordinary objects can carry extraordinary histories.
Curated by Lekha Hileman, Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive is both playful and contemplative, offering a meditation on the body as a site of remembrance. Adams’s work suggests that healing can emerge through collective gestures and that cloth, like memory itself, can hold what words often cannot.
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Further Information:
Igshaan Adams: Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive is at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from 5 May to 1 November 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Igshaan Adams, Midday Sun Makes Little Difference, 2022 (detail). © Igshaan Adams. Photo: Mario Todeschini / Casey Kaplan Gallery
All further images as credited in captions.