IGSHAAN ADAMS

Early years and Background

Adams grew up in Bonteheuwel, a township on the Cape Flats shaped by apartheid-era racial classifications, an environment that continues to inform his attention to marginalised spaces and domestic infrastructures. Classified under the apartheid category ‘Coloured’ and raised in a Muslim family with Christian grandparents, he navigated intersecting experiences of race, faith, and sexuality that underpin the layered identities explored in his work.

He studied art and design in Cape Town, completing a National Certificate in Art & Design at the College of Cape Town and a Diploma in Fine Art at the Ruth Prowse School of Art. Adams continues to be based in South Africa while working closely with galleries and institutions in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East.

Igshaan Adams Artworks

Igshaan Adams’s artworks combine weaving, sculpture, performance, and installation, using materials such as beads, wire, linoleum, rope, fabric, and found domestic objects to map invisible paths shaped by belief, intimacy, and social control. Across wall-based tapestries, expansive floor pieces, and suspended ‘dust cloud’ forms, Adams transforms humble, often worn materials into abstract topographies that register personal and collective histories.

Desire lines and everyday cartographies

Since the mid-2010s, Adams has been recognised for textile works that translate ‘desire lines’—informal paths traced by people and movement through cities and neighbourhoods—into woven diagrams of social life. In pieces emerging around Desire Lines at the Art Institute of Chicago, aerial and map-like compositions render footprints, shortcuts, and crossings through beads and rope, bringing the politics of access and segregation into the language of abstraction.

Domestic surfaces and devotional pattern

Adams frequently draws on the worn linoleum floors of Cape Town homes, lifting their geometric patterns and scuff marks into large-scale tapestries and installations that recall prayer rugs, thresholds, and architectural grids. These works fuse Islamic ornamental structures with traces of domestic labour and care, using repetition, colour shifts, and gaps in the weave to suggest both continuity and rupture in everyday life.

Movement, choreography, and the body

More recent projects extend his interest in movement into collaborations with dancers, where bodies leave pigment traces that become scores for woven compositions. Across projects including Weerhoud and subsequent installations, Adams explores how choreography, breath, and withheld emotion might be translated into tactile surfaces, positioning weaving as a form of embodied notation.

Select Public Collections and Commissions

• Major institutional installations and floor-based works have entered collections at museums in South Africa, Europe, and North America, including the Art Institute of Chicago and other leading contemporary art museums.
• Large, suspended textile ‘dust cloud’ works and architecturally scaled tapestries have been commissioned for biennials and museum exhibitions in Venice, São Paulo, Milan, and Jeddah.

Select Awards and Accolades

• Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art, South Africa (2018)
• Participation in 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (2022)
• Participation in the 35th São Paulo Biennial, Choreographies of the Impossible (2023)
• Inclusion in international surveys of contemporary African and diasporic art at major museums in Europe and the United States.

To be kept up to date with news relating to Igshaan Adams, follow him on Ocula.

Igshaan Adams Exhibitions

Igshaan Adams has been the subject of solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important institutions and galleries worldwide. Below is a selection of important institutional exhibitions.

Select solo exhibitions and presentations

• 2025–26, Lulu, Zanele, Zandile, Savannah, stairwell commission, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, United States
• 2025, Igshaan Adams: I’ve been here all along, I’ve been waiting, Hill Art Foundation, New York, United States
• 2024, Solo exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, United States
• 2024, Solo exhibition, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, United Kingdom
• 2022, Igshaan Adams: Desire Lines, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, United States
• 2022, Kicking Dust, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
• 2021, Solo exhibition, Hayward Gallery, London, United Kingdom
• 2018, Solo exhibition, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

Select group and biennial exhibitions

• 2025, Major survey exhibition at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark
• 2023, Choreographies of the Impossible, 35th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil
• 2023, Awwal Bayt, Islamic Arts Biennale, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
• 2022, The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
• 2022, Unknown Unknowns: An Introduction to Mysteries, 23rd Triennale Milano, Milan, Italy
• 2021, Slowly Arriving, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Switzerland
• 2020, Allied with Power, Pérez Art Museum Miami, United States
• 2019, Mapping Black Identities, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, United States

To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Igshaan Adams, follow him on Ocula.

Igshaan Adams FAQs

Ocula | 2025