To understand the history of South Africa, you must understand how the the laws of apartheid forced South Africans to live in assigned racial spaces. To comprehend present day South Africa, you must understand that even 30 years since my country’s first national democratic election, these racist and fascist laws are still held in our bodies and are passed down through the generations.
We are a people suspended between apartheid and freedom, between memories and the future. We aren’t the rainbow nation that our beloved Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931-2021) called us. Instead, we inhabit those in-between spaces where one colour of the rainbow starts to move into the next.
It is this complexity that Igshaan Adams’s new exhibition, Weerhoud at The Hepworth in Wakefield, embodies. Adams’s work is all about bodies. To understand it, you too need to move your body through the exhibition and dance with his sculptures, tapestries and cloud installation.
