Weerhoud at The Hepworth Wakefield: the spirit of dance animates Igshaan Adams’s reflection on South Africa’s history

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.

Weerhoud means “withheld” in Afrikaans. According to The Hepworth, the exhibition examines the impact of trauma on the human psyche and the healing potential of movement. A relationship between artwork and movement is integral to Adams’s work. As the museum explains: “His practice challenges apartheid’s attempt to confine people through racialised spaces, portraying the body as a catalyst for resistance against dominant structures.”

This concept of the body as a site for resistance is at the core of contemporary dance in South Africa (the subject of my recent book). In Adams’s tapestry, Jaime-Lee, Byron, Dustin, Faroll, Lynette (2024), this is made visible. The tapestry is a choreography of cotton twine, polypropylene and polyester rope, plastic, glass, wooden and stone beads, cotton fabric, mohair, silver and nickel chain and tiger tail wire.

The piece came from Adams’s work with the dance group Garage Dance Ensemble. This ensemble was founded by John Linden and Alfred Hinkel, pioneers of contemporary dance in South Africa who view dance as a tool for social justice and equal education, and Byron Klassen, a trailblazer for the next generation of South African contemporary dance-makers.

Dancers from Garage Dance Ensemble (for whom the tapestry is named) “interacted with a large canvas placed on top of freshly painted linoleum, leaving behind traces” of their bodies that Adams used as a map for his tapestry. Through this artwork, Adams makes the ways that movement can heal visible. He shows how literal choreography, rather than the metaphorical choreography of the legislative apparatus of apartheid, can be a way to repair our scars.

In an exhibition caption, Adams tells South Africans: “You carry the scars, but no one can see them. They are in our memories and our bodies, but they remain unseen.” Through his art, these scars are made visible, but also beautiful – after all, the plastic framing the semi-precious stone beads shines too.

There is an element of dance too in Adam’s installation of his new dust cloud sculpture Weerhoud (2024), which is suspended from the gallery space’s ceiling, sometimes touching the floor. The piece evokes the Nama Stap and the Rieldans, dances local to the area where Garage Dance Ensemble are based.

Dust is central to these dance styles, where the rapid footwork of the dancers causes the dust to fly up from the ground. In Weerhoud, this karring (Afrikaans for churn) of dust is made up of (as the caption explains): “memory, metal and copper wire, plastic and wooden beads, metal charms, semi-precious stones, lampshade structure, cast-iron security bars, candle holder, metal plant holder, resin spray, automotive spray paint and other found objects”. It’s a tapestry that refuses to be fixed to a wall and remain static. Again, Adams captures movement between the then and now, and shows that our histories and our futures are always dancing intertwined.

I have always firmly argued that dance is the only art form that is able to show that moment, but I might need to rethink this. Adams’s exhibition does this too – it is both an art exhibition and a work of choreography.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.