Igshaan Adams: Unsettling Dust—The Body’s Archive

Curator: Lekha Hileman

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is pleased to present in situ: Igshaan Adams. Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive, the third chapter of the Museum’s in situ series, a program that invites artists to create site-specific works in dialogue with the gallery’s architecture. Conceived as a platform for ambitious projects by leading contemporary artists, in situ highlights practices that expand the possibilities of sculpture, installation, and multimedia. Each presentation engages directly with the Museum’s distinctive gallery dedicated to the series, transforming it into environments where architecture and artistic imagination converge.

Igshaan Adams (b. 1982, Cape Town) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work navigates the intersections of personal history and broader social structures. Raised in Bonteheuwel, a suburb shaped by the forced removals and spatial segregation of apartheid, Adams has long been attentive to how ideology is inscribed onto the body and the built environment alike. Working across weaving, sculpture, and installation, he employs materials such as rope, beads, wire, and found objects—each carrying tactile and cultural associations—to construct intricate surfaces that register the entanglement of race, religion, sexuality, and memory.

Adams’s early works often drew on found materials and the patterned linoleum floors of domestic interiors, translating these familiar geometries into intimate abstractions. Over time, his practice expanded into an engagement with so-called “desire lines”—paths formed by the repeated movement of bodies through space, often in quiet defiance of imposed routes. These works marked a shift toward understanding movement not only as trace, but as a collective, embodied negotiation of space and belonging.

In recent years, Adams has extended this inquiry into movement as both process and form. His ongoing collaboration with Garage Dance Ensemble in O’okiep, in South Africa’s Northern Cape—his maternal family’s place of origin—has opened a dialogue between weaving and dance. Through a series of workshops, dancers move across canvases laid over painted linoleum, generating what Adams describes as “dance prints”: layered monotypes that record gestures of contact, rhythm, and release. For the artist, such movement carries a reparative potential, a means of dislodging trauma held within the body and reconfiguring it through collective action.