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.
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.
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