Name: Igshaan Adams
Place of Birth: Südafrika
Year of Birth: 1982
Areas of Work: Mixed-Media, Installation, performance 
Website: 
http://www.blankprojects.com/artists/igshaan-adams/

Born in Cape Town in 1982, Igshaan Adams is an installation and mixed media artist whose work investigates hybrid identity, particularly in relation to race and sexuality. Adams was raised in a community racially classified in South Africa as ‘coloured’ under apartheid legislature. The term ‘coloured’ is still used in South Africa to refer to the creole community whose distant origins are Malay, but whose racial profile is hybrid and unclassifiable. An observant but liberal Muslim raised by Christian grandparents, Adams occupies a precarious place in his religious community because of his homosexuality. His work speaks to his experiences of racial, religious and sexual liminality in South Africa, but breaks with a strong representational convention in recent South African art. Adams uses the material and formal iconographies of Islam and ‘coloured’ culture to develop a more equivocal, phenomenological exploration of liminalilty.

Adams graduated in 2009 with a Diploma in Fine Art from the Ruth Prowse School of Art, Cape Town.

His first solo show, Vinyl, was held at the AVA Gallery in Cape Town in 2010, followed by In Between at Stevenson Gallery (2011), If that I knew at the Rongwrong Gallery in Amsterdam, and Have you seen Him? at blank projects (2013).
Selected group exhibitions include Swallow My Pride at blank projects (2010) and What we talk about when we talk about love at Stevenson (2011).

In 2012 Wanted Magazine selected Adams as one of its 12 Young African Artists featured at the Joburg Art Fair, and in 2013 he was awarded the IAAB/Pro-Helvetia residency in Basel, Switzerland, culminating in a solo exhibition at the Basement project space in Basel.  

Sommerakademie 2014
Opening/Nominators' Day
15. August 2014, Zentrum Paul Klee.
Video by David Röthlisberger