Raised in Bonteheuwel, a former segregated township in Cape Town, South Africa, Igshaan Adams grew up in an acutely challenging setting, against which he has maintained a multifaceted racial, religious, and sexual identity. Adams’ large- scale tapestries are inspired by the geometric patterns of linoleum floors found throughout the Cape Town homes of friends and neighbours. Stitched together with fragments of locally sourced wood, plastic, beads, shells, string, and rope, they are deeply linked to commodity trading and local environs in postcolonial Africa. In some tapestries, Adams records other types of movement by drawing from “desire lines,” unplanned paths made as a consequence of erosion from foot traffic, which throughout the Apartheid era were used to connect communities that the government wanted to forcibly separate. For The Milk of Dreams, Adams zooms in on desire lines between the Bonteheuwel train station in Cape Town and Epping, one of the city’s industrial neighbourhoods, where many seek work. Presented in tandem with a twisting wire installation inspired by the dust clouds created by the Indigenous Northern Cape riel dance, makeshift pathways born of necessity are transposed against an uplifting sign of collective joy.
Madeline Weisburg
