黑料不打烊

What, then, accounts for the mysterious intelligibility of artworks? This question seems to find expression directly and obliquely in Igshaan Adams鈥� new body of work aptly titled Holy Terrain (2024). As with recent showings 鈥� Weerhoud (2024), Lynloop (2024), Prim锚re Wentelbaan (2023), Vastrapplek (2022) and Desire Lines (2022) 鈥� this offering has a distinct weight, a comportment that narrates his search for a meaningful space where the body, indeed the self, can dwell purposefully. In this exhibition, Adams inaugurates a line of questioning that concedes our precariousness to the multiple ways in which we inhabit the world 鈥� the ways in which the self can be sanctified anew amidst all sorts of existential harms.

Composed of no less than fifteen artworks, there is in this oeuvre, much like in the previous exhibitions, the ever-present and ever-morphing feature of materiality that operates parallel to a thematic breadth that encircles this work. In a palpable sense, Adams鈥� work exalts and recalibrates an age-old modernist tenet that insists on a 鈥渢ruth to materials鈥� 鈥� a sensibility that emboldens the essence of materials as opposed to its concealment. Materiality for Adams simultaneously bears a distinct aesthetic, ideological, and political function. It is the nodal point where the use of linoleum, beads, thread, wire, cotton twine and fabric coalesce with their deep excavations into themes of spirituality, cultural identity, queerness, and ecological crisis. In this assemblage of possibilities and points of departure brought to life through his inventive use of materials, what then emerges is what we might think of as a continuous surface that is characterized by different textures of formal and conceptual complexity.