Chuma Adam

Presentation

Chuma Adam (b. 2001) is an emerging artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is a multidisciplinary artist exploring painting, printmaking, and drawing. Her bodies of work are primarily informed by a philosopher she greatly admires, Édouard Glissant, and his theory on opacity from his acclaimed book, Poetics of Relation. “When thinking about opacity,” Adam says, “I think about being opaque. Visible, but indescribable.” Chuma’s works challenge themes of visibility, or lack thereof, as she dances around the complex tropes of Blackness and self-actualisation in the realms of her Black identity. Chuma mainly works through these thoughts, emotions, and conceptual processes through the abstraction of the intangible complexities of navigating one’s self. Chuma creates feelings of abstruse vulnerability through her immersive visual language.