in situ: Igshaan Adams. Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive opens next week at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Adams’ work brings together performance, weaving, sculpture and installation to explore and unsettle racial, sexual and religious boundaries. Born in Bonteheuwel, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, he draws on his lived experience to create works that function as palimpsests, where personal histories are layered, obscured and reinscribed. Densely crafted and materially rich, they draw together cultural and spiritual references that trace both intimate memory and wider socio-political realities. As Adams has said, “I am interested in the personal stories recorded on the surface. What is recorded is not necessarily always a factual account but can be what is imagined, a combination of myth-making and meaning-making.”

The works presented at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, developed through Adams’ collaboration with Garage Dance Ensemble in O’okiep (Northern Cape, South Africa), originated from performances staged in 2024 during a residency and exhibition at NEON in Athens. Emerging from his ongoing dialogue between weaving and dance, they began with dancers moving across canvases laid over painted linoleum floors, leaving behind layered traces of gesture, rhythm and release. At Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, these traces are translated into large-scale woven tapestries suspended in space and accompanied by smaller woven ‘clouds’, giving form to memory and movement, and proposing weaving as a bodily, communal practice of healing.

Curated by Lekha Hileman.

in situ: Igshaan Adams
Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive

5 May–1 November 2026

Opening Talks: Igshaan Adams, Monday 4 May, 6.00pm

Performance: Garage Dance Ensemble and Talk with Igshaan Adams, Tuesday 5 May, 6.30pm

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
48009 Bilbao
Spain
(Galleries: 204, 208)