Igshaan Adams on how art helped him tap into his true identity

Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner Igshaan Adams challenges stilted ways of thinking with provocative installation entitled 'When Dust Settles'

05 August 2018 - 00:00 By tymon smith

A few minutes before this year's Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner Igshaan Adams arrives for our interview at the Standard Bank Gallery, I'm standing in one of the installations that make up his show, When Dust Settles.
Two middle-aged white men in work clothes walk past. "So this is art, hey?" asks the one. "Ja, so they tell me," replies his colleague. "Shit hey, I should get into this art game and get paid lots of money to stick this kak on walls all over the world," says the first man as they chuckle and disappear into an unseen room.
To those not familiar with his work, it's easy to understand how Adams's work might alienate: floors plastered with tatty pieces of vinyl, abstract sculptures made of string wrapped around the kind of wire fencing you find at a local garden centre, some woven wool tapestries of abstract patterns hung against a wall, a video playing in a corner of Adams and his brother performing the Islamic ritual of washing feet before prayer.
However, for those who have been following Adams's work over the past few years, these are familiar continuations of ideas and concepts that the artist has developed as a means of working through his thoughts and feelings about the nature of the many elements of his identity - coloured, homosexual, Muslim.
When he arrives, I suggest that having walked through the exhibition and noticing its vinyl floor patchwork with its paths of tears and holes, perhaps I should take my shoes off to fully experience it. But, he tells me, "you don't want to do that, they're dirty and from all sorts of places and they still have their smell".Born in 1982, Adams grew up in the Cape Town township of Bonteheuwel and, although he practised Islam, he was raised by his Christian grandparents. As he recalls, this "created a bit of confusion for me and I hated the fact that I was Muslim as a kid because the people who were closest to me, my own, were not sharing my faith - it was just me and my brother".After a period of atheism in his 20s, which he now sees as "a way of allowing me to explore my sexuality without the guilt and fear that comes with religion", Adams returned to his Islamic roots and pursued art.
"[I] had these deep questions about myself and my existence and why I responded to certain situations the way I did. I had these quite deep questions about how I responded to my environment and how my environment created me, specifically the domestic environment, and that's where it started."
His first performance formed part of his graduation at the Ruth Prowse School of Art. Insouciantly titled Jou Ma Se Poes, it consisted of an installation replicating the living room of his grandparents' house; it included his actual grandmother, who sat in a chair crocheting in front of a TV playing an episode of Afrikaans soapie 7de Laan.
For Adams, this was "about the nurturing component of forming an identity and she certainly played a crucial role there".
Since then Adams has performed with other members of his family, including his mother, who, at the opening of When Dust Settles at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown this year, formed part of the installation - standing in a corner cooking the traditional Cape Malay dessert boeber and serving it to the audience.
He says that this idea - not repeated in Johannesburg but due for a reappearance when the show moves to Cape Town - was inspired by a dream where he saw his mother "boiling these pots of milk and then allowed it to cool down and there was a layer of cream and she said 'This is for you, you can have as much as you like', because she knows that I love it".For Adams there is a certain nostalgia about his upbringing and his family that's important to the work. Although he grew up under apartheid he observes that "it's amazing what your memory does over time because as harsh as it was at the time somehow you look back on it and you have good feelings and that's why I think nostalgia is a good experience ... most of the time."
Adams also sees this exhibition not only as an opportunity to bring his work to audiences beyond Cape Town but also to explore an issue that he's interested in from his experience of growing up in that city: "the animosity between Cape Coloured people - Muslims or not - and the Xhosa-speaking community. It's a major problem."
He says: "I grew up to be a racist because it was normal in my home and everywhere, and in a way I feel lucky that I had art to approach it."
The five years he spent teaching art in Khayelitsha helped him "to undo a lot of the damage and deal with the ignorance because it is so separate and segregated. But once you interact and engage and learn more there's no need for this ignorance."
In acknowledgement of that experience, he chose the pieces of vinyl flooring from homes in Bonteheuwel and Khayelitsha to create a floor for the space, where, while "you'll never be able to tell which comes from where", he hopes "represents a class of people, the working class, and we both have the same experiences."
I ask Adams what represents his ideal interaction between his audience and his challenging work. He smiles as he entertains this cliched request before saying: "At my first Vinyl exhibition I had a woman who came up to me and said: 'You know what? I don't know what this is about, I don't understand it, I don't get it, but there's something about it that just pulls me in.' I love that because she had allowed herself to feel something as opposed to trying to intellectualise and explain it away."
• 'When Dust Settles' shows at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg until September 15...

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