Igshaan Adams

Igshaan Adams (born 1982) is a South African artist working on tapestries and textile-based sculptures, installations, and performance. His work has been included in the 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams, in 2022; and the 2023 Sao Paulo Biennial: Choreographies of the Impossible.

Early life
Igshaan Adams was born in 1982, in Cape Town, South Africa. He grew up in the township of Bonteheuwel, located on the Cape Flats only southeast of Cape Town. Bonteheuwel was a segregated site and created in apartheid-South Africa era of racial segregation for residents of multiracial communities. He is queer.

Career
Adams creates large-scale tapestries, wall and floor installations made of plastic, fabric, textile, and other everyday materials such washcloths and garden fencing. Much of their work is informed by childhood memories, family relationships, the house they grew up in and the surrounding community.

Exhibitions
In 2019, his work was included in the group show In This Imperfect Present Moment at the Seattle Art Museum.

Igshaan Adams's first solo exhibition in the United States, Getuie, took place at the SCAD Museum of Art, at the School of Art and Design, Savannah, in 2020. For the show, the artist used linoleum flooring removed from working-class houses in Cape Town in his installation.

The solo exhibition Igshaan Adams: Desire Lines was on view at Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, in 2022. The mid-career retrospective gathered artworks produced since 2014 to the present, and an accompanying monographic catalog was published by the museum.

Adams work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. His first solo show in continental Europe Igshaan Adams: Kicking Dust was presented at the Kunsthalle Zürich, and covered topics such as landscape, architecture, human relations and sexuality.

In 2023, Adams participated in the Sao Paulo Art Biennial, Brazil, for the first time. Their work is going to be showcased next to international artists such as Torkwase Dyson, Ellen Gallagher, Elizabeth Catlett, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Wifredo Lam, Dayanita Singh, and Deborah Anzinger, among many others.

Most recent presentations of Adams work includes Lynloop, a monumental installation commissioned for the lobby at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts, in 2024. Using Google Earth imagery to ground his work, the installation is a representation of the footpaths between a sports field and a social space in the town of Heideveld, Cape Town.

In 2024, his solo show Igshaan Adams: Weerhoud is taking place at the Hepworth Wakefield museum, in West Yorkshire.

Collections
Igshaan Adams work is featured in the collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA), Minnesota.

Awards
In 2018 he was the winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in South Africa. Adams was awarded an artist-in-residence program by the Zeitz MOCAA, South Africa.