Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

Lulu, Zanele, Zandile, Savannah (2025), a new commission for ICA Miami’s stairwell, is a monumental installation by South African artist Igshaan Adams, comprising four tapestries and a group of the artist’s suspended “dust clouds,” made from carefully twisted wires and other repurposed everyday materials. At ICA Miami, Adam’s tapestries will be hung vertically down the museum’s fifty-foot stairwell, resulting in a resplendent cascade that allows for expansive views throughout the building.

Adams’s work draws on histories of collective weaving, ornamental motifs from hybrid traditions, traditional beading, and the revaluation of mundane materials. The artist’s luminous tapestries are woven with chromatically intense and contrasting threads, resulting in forms that can evoke aerial views of a landscape. Brimming with visual and material incidents, the tapestries include ornamental chains, lace, and fringe, and are studded with a multitude of beads on which light bounces, making their surfaces shimmer. The four tapestries included in Lulu, Zanele, Zandile, Savannah, in particular, signal a new development in Adams’ practices, which involves dancers performing atop the tapestries and marking them before they are beaded. The memory of the dance and of the body’s movements through the world provide the ground for these works.

The “dust clouds,” which Adams suspends in front of and around the tapestries, add a rich sculptural dimension to the project, and also harbor quiet allusions. While suggesting meteorological phenomena and models of cosmic space, they also index the joyful dust-ups of bodies dancing, the rhythmic stumping that puts intense vibrations in the air. These “clouds” point not only to the popular dancing and festivities of the artist’s upbringing in South Africa, but to the twirling dervishes of Sufism, a mystical wing of Islam that has long fascinated Adams and which he has researched in depth. One of Sufiism’s main tenants is that the body is a conduit of divine forces and that imagination gives momentary form to the vibrational field of reality, challenging classifications, say those of gender or ethnicity, that thrive on restriction and closure . Adams’ “dust clouds” are a momentary consolidation of joyful human exchange.

Igshaan Adams was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1982, where he lives. He has held one-person exhibitions at Hayward Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich; ARoS Art House Museum, Aarhus, Denmark; The Art Institute of Chicago; and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia. He has also participated in group exhibitions at various institutions, including MoMA, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In 2021, Adams participated in the Venice Biennial, and in 2023 he presented a major installation at the Sao Paulo Biennial.

Igshaan Adams: Lulu, Zanele, Zandile, Savannah is organized by Gean Moreno, Director, Art + Research Center at ICA Miami.