Igshaan Adams Brings a Decade of Woven Memory to Mudam Luxembourg in “Between Then and Now”
A loom, a dance floor, and the airborne drift of dust all share the same question in Mudam Luxembourg’s new exhibition: how does a body move through a world designed to divide it? “Igshaan Adams: Between Then and Now,” now on view at the museum on Luxembourg’s Kirchberg plateau, gathers more than ten years of work by South African artist Igshaan Adams (b. 1982), from monumental tapestries to suspended, cloud-like sculptures and the artist’s distinctive “dance prints.”
Organized by Mudam Luxembourg in partnership with The Hepworth Wakefield in the United Kingdom and ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark, the project has been conceived to travel, with different versions presented across the three institutions. The exhibition’s international itinerary mirrors Adams’s rising profile: his work has appeared at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hayward Gallery in London, and the Venice Biennale.
At Mudam, the show is also a conversation with place. The museum’s building, designed by Ieoh Ming Pei, frames Adams’s practice in a setting where light, height, and circulation are felt as much as seen. That architectural awareness matters for an artist whose work repeatedly returns to the politics of space: who is allowed to move freely, who is redirected, and what traces remain.
Adams was born in Cape Town and grew up in Bonteheuwel, a neighborhood shaped by apartheid-era racial segregation. The exhibition positions that lived experience as a generative tension in his work, where personal memory intersects with Sufi spirituality, Muslim heritage, and South African vernacular cultures. Rather than offering autobiography as confession, Adams treats making as a form of repair: a way to bind fractures without pretending they never existed.
“Between Then and Now” is described as a “woven chronology,” and the metaphor holds. Bringing together more than 60 works, including new commissions alongside existing pieces, the exhibition proposes each object as a knot in a larger network of recollection. The result is not a linear retrospective but a braided timeline, where materials and gestures recur, shift, and accumulate meaning.
Mudam’s presentation is structured around three strands of Adams’s practice. First are the large woven and beaded tapestries that occupy multiple rooms and function as the exhibition’s anchor. Woven on a loom, they combine textile fibers with glass beads, chains, ribbons, rope, and metal elements. Their surfaces can read as luminous and iridescent or deliberately subdued, punctuated by gaps, snags, and areas of wear that refuse the seamless finish associated with decorative textile traditions.
Several of these works draw on “desire lines” — the informal paths pedestrians carve across parks, vacant lots, and other in-between spaces. Adams studies these routes, often visible in aerial views, and translates them into abstract networks of lines and bifurcations. In his hands, the shortcut becomes a quiet record of agency: a micro-geography of everyday resistance that reveals how people negotiate the built environment when official routes do not serve them.
The second strand comprises suspended “cloud” sculptures, which extend Adams’s interest in movement and memory into the air. The exhibition frames these hovering forms through the language of dust, dance, and recollection, emphasizing how the intangible can be given weight and presence.
Finally, an immersive environment is dedicated to Adams’s “dance prints,” works born from danced movement and understood as physical residues of gesture. Seen together with the tapestries and suspended sculptures, they form what the exhibition calls a “silent choreography,” inviting visitors to read the gallery not only as a place to look, but as a space where bodies, trajectories, and histories are continuously negotiated.
Across the show, Adams’s materials remain pointedly modest: beads, chains, ropes, ribbons, electrical wires, and fragments of linoleum or carpet associated with everyday life in Cape Town’s townships. Transformed through weaving, assemblage, suspension, and performance, they become metaphors for identity and belonging — and for resilience that is neither abstract nor sentimental, but built, thread by thread, from what is at hand.
In Luxembourg, “Between Then and Now” ultimately argues that weaving is more than technique. It is a way of thinking about time and community: connecting, knotting, and mending where history has enforced separation — and where healing, if it comes, arrives as a practice rather than a promise.
