Igshaan Adams: A Body of Work

During a talk on his 2022 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, South African artist Igshaan Adams was told by an attendee that many children felt the urge to touch his work: “it's so interactive and your body feels like dancing” (Adams and Folkerts 2022b: n.p.). Younger viewers, less concerned with posturing at a museum, often respond to artwork with their bodies, a reaction Adams's oeuvre seems to particularly evoke. I cannot blame them. My first face-to-face encounter with his work sparked a rare sense of awe toward its luxurious sensorial quality. Edmund Husserl writes that “[a] subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not at all have an appearing body” (Husserl 1989: 158). Touch is a necessary sense for our experience of the body and its image, which is why children's tactile impulse around Adams's work is an obvious response to...