NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS
Biography
Using a system-specific approach, rather than a site-specific one, Nolan Oswald Dennis questions the politics of space and time through a practice they call ‘a black consciousness of space’. Through diagrams, models and drawings, Oswald explores the structural and systematic mechanisms that organise our world.[1]
Born in 1988 to South African parents who were in exile in Lusaka, Zambia, Oswald was later raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. While studying at the University of the Witwatersrand, they were influenced by spaces in Johannesburg like Keleketla! Library and Drill Hall, where they would go during their undergraduate to meet people and make sense of the difficult and complex world we are in. Through these spaces, for Oswald, the art world became a space of “solidarity, impatience and a determination to change it”.[2]
Dennis graduated with a Bachelors of Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2012.[3] Whilst being a student at Wits University and through spending their free-time in and around Joburg, they began collaborating on arts projects within networks of artists and creatives. As an architecture student, they were interested in understanding space and explored space using a lens of deep histories, searching for social and historical reverberations of the past in the present.[4] They found that the discipline of architecture privileged objects – the built environment – over interactions with the world. Tracing this to how Western thought and white supremacy overlooks certain agencies and actions, Dennis began looking for a language to describe what they were thinking/feeling. In thinking about interactions, Dennis combines space and time together, shifting away from linearity and towards thinking about movement, actions, and interactions within cyclical time, always moving in complex and interconnected ways.[5] In 2016, Nolan Oswald Dennis won the 2016 FNB Art Fair Prize, central to their show Furthermore / More was a turn towards parallel futures through land and memory.[6]
After winning the FNB Art Fair Prize, Nolan Oswald Dennis continued their studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where they graduated with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2018.[7] This interdisciplinary programme facilitates artist-thinkers as they experiment and use transdisciplinary approaches to explore art’s broad, global history in conjunction with practice driven theory and an emphasis on science, technology and design.[8] A commitment to engaging theory, as well as to global, un-bordered, liberatory thinking and making are cornerstones to Dennis’ work.
Alongside Bogosi Sekhukhuni and Tabita Rezaire, Nolan Oswald Dennis is part of a three-person tech-healing collective called NTU. NTU began collaborating in 2015 and together the collective expands upon temporal and spatial thinking and applying it to socio-historical phenomena. Grounded in an interest in African spiritual philosophies, liberation praxis, and African science and technology, NTU engages technologies of epistemic liberation and scientific enquiry, while their work resists internalised or imposed white, heteronormative, patriarchal, imperial power structures.[9] In 2023, NTU exhibited together at Kunsthalle Bern in a show themed around their ruminations on collective and solo practices, it explores how they impact one another and how this takes shape through moments of influence and interactions. For them, their collective work is an affective labour, a friendship that blends together their friendship and collaborative practice.[10]
In 2020-2021, Nolan Oswald Dennis was a Digital Earth Fellow, where they introduced the black earth study club, both a conceptual proposition and a research methodology within a project where they propose developing and researching new planetary relations guided by black liberation theory.[11] Three areas of concern emerged from this work: firstly, a general task which was to re-establish relations with the earth, which includes repairing past relations and developing new ones. The second concern is the strategic task to “become planet as collective praxis” by developing the tools to be more attentive and attuned to the earth so that we can find ourselves connected to the earth.[12] The third concern of their black earth study club project was to listen to black silence, accessing an acoustic ecology of possibility, to listen to signal~noise, and to sense differently.[13] The black earth study club convenes new thinkers in each session, bringing participatory education and world building together. The latest iteration of the black earth study club was at Nolan Oswald Dennis’ exhibition at Gasworks, London in 2025.
During their time in the Delfina Foundation’s residency programme in 2021, Nolan Oswald Dennis worked within the theme of ‘Collecting as Practice’, where they engaged the possibilities of repairing technical and science museums’ colonial heritage, suggesting a decolonial approach for these kinds of museum collections. They suggested that by doing this, new lines of thinking are unearthed, as are alternative and potential histories.[14] They were shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2023/24 and in 2023 their work was shown at the Biennale SescVideobrasil, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, the Ljubljana Biennale, and Liverpool Biennale.[15] In addition, they designed the ‘Traces of Ecstasy’ pavilion for the Lagos Biennial. In 2024, they opened up their first major South African museum solo exhibition, UNDERSTUDIES at the Zeitz MOCAA.[16]
By developing an attunement to (unseen) structures and systems that govern our world, Nolan Oswald Dennis’ works reveal the ways in which our relations with space and time are shaped by a white, heteropatriarchal, and imperial forces. As a praxis oriented by decolonisation and black liberation, using academically-oriented modes such as diagrams, models, and drawings, Oswald’s work reveals these hidden relations and projects new futures and connections through collective and connective working-thinking-being. Their work becomes process-oriented and iterative, changing as new insights are gained, and adjusting to account for an ever-changing world order. Furthermore, Dennis’ collaborative efforts to connect and create collectively allow for an exploration of the agents, actors, and actions that stimulate our world to be different.
ARTIST STATEMENT
a garden for fanon (2021): Bioactive system of earthworms, books, glass globes, microcontroller, steel armature; Dimensions variable; Private Collection; Photography by Anthea Pokroy
This is a quiet work.
What we want is a place to think together with the text, the soil, the community of worms, and the
general and specific systems in which we are all implicated.
There is a sound element to this installation, it requires an exhibition environment in which the dripping
of the water and the whirring of the peristaltic pumps is audible.
There is an aspect of space which is not specified (or specifiable), it has to do with care and quietness
and invitation.
This work asks us (all of us who encounter this work) to contribute to the care and maintainance of an
environment for a community of worms to consume Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. This work
is not a sculptural proposition for contemplation but a programmatic proposition for a common relation
with the land (which is a way of saying the planet)
Excerpt from a garden for fanon installation instructions
A curriculum for mud is a set of research and poetic assemblages for modelling relations between decolonial knowledge, black space and African time.
MODEL 01 is an apparatus for turning texts from the black liberation archive into soil in cooperation with a community of Eisnia foetida earth worms.
In this collaboration, the process of earthworms consuming the text as food becomes an act of reading otherwise, engaging the material and symbolic substance of the text on earthy terms.
The worms consume the cellulose fibre in the paper, cotton and card which make up the physical structure of books, converting them into flesh, energy, heat and worm casings (shit) which is soil (along with a parallel community of micro-organisms). This act of consumption re-inscribes indigenous practices of communicating across epistemic lines, modelled on protocols of offering and sacrifice which are precursors to communication
with ancestors, the dead, the non-human, the godly, and the extra-human.
The gesture of sharing knowledge with soil, worms, and the earth itself, sets up conditions of possibility in which an expanded collective can imagine and remember practices of resistance differently.
The diagram of the curriculum describes the programmatic interaction of inputs, in the form of non-specific archives, processing, in the form of collective work, a systematised interspecies act of reading, feeding, composting; and output , in the form of a set of indices – a reading list, a larger community of worms (wormy reproduction), and a cache of (new) soil. This is a process of commune-ication.
The afterlife of the curricula include the processes of sharing, circulating and returning these outputs to the planetary record (digging holes, and burying worms, using the soil for planting, etc).
A curriculum for mud is an ongoing attempt to think about knowing.
To think in ways that unsettle the authority of any single way of knowing, to think about, and with, knowing bodies.
In this project of unsettling, soil is a conceptual and material ally which operates in the symbolic space of the brownfield, a space of reuse and reanimation.
The project of the curriculum is invested in revisiting already worked-over ground, exhausted and exhaustive archives. In the world of this research apparatus, memory, as the precondition of knowing, is an act of restoration. We rework this soil not to extract anything new but to regenerate the conditions and relations of its becoming.
A curriculum is not a tool to rediscover history, but to participate in knowing and memory outside any parameters of utility. To pursue study as a social and metabolic activity rather than a practice of acquiring skill, expertise, or mastery.
Against humanist histories of anti-colonial struggle in which the project of liberation is imagined through western regimes of basic human rights, economic development, industrial individuation (simply put, a struggle to become a man (white male capitalist)) there persists an inhuman practice and tradition of thinking (making) the world.
This imminent tradition does not terminate (or originate) at the gendered and hopeless site of man, but rather entangles whatever human being as a companion in the multi-species, pluriversal terminus of the world itself. In this other tradition, the anti-colonial project of the last (short) century is a committed struggle for the basic possibility of a planet.
Sources
[1] Goodman Gallery. [no date]. Goodman gallery. Available at: https://www.goodman-gallery.com/artists/nolan-oswald-dennis#about [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[2] Kayafm Digital and Dennis, N.O. 2016. Meet Nolan Oswald Dennis – Artist, And So Much More. Kaya 959. Available at: https://www.kaya959.co.za/nolan-oswald-dennis/ [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[3] Jason, S. 2016. Nolan Oswald Dennis on South Africa’s shattered dreams and the future. Available at: https://mg.co.za/article/2016-05-12-shattered-dreams-and-the-future/ [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[4] Dennis, N.O. [no date]. How to unmake the world. Available at: https://africasacountry.com/2025/05/how-to-unmake-the-world/ [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[5] Dennis, N.O. [no date]. How to unmake the world. Available at: https://africasacountry.com/2025/05/how-to-unmake-the-world/ [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[6] ArtThrob and Dennis, N.O. 2016. FNB Joburg Art Fair 2016: Interview with Nolan Oswald Dennis. ArtThrob. Available at: https://artthrob.co.za/2016/09/10/fnb-joburg-art-fair-2016-interview-with-nolan-oswald-dennis/ [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[7] Dennis, N.O. [no date]. How to unmake the world. Available at: https://africasacountry.com/2025/05/how-to-unmake-the-world/ [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[8] MIT Architecture. [no date]. Art Culture + Technology. Available at: https://architecture.mit.edu/art-culture-technology [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[9] Rezaire, T. [no date]. NTU. Available at: https://tabitarezaire.com/ntu [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[10] Kunsthalle Bern. 2023. Within collective thought – a synthesis. NTU – Within collective thought – a synthesis. Available at: https://www.contemporaryartpool.ch/storage/events/press_release/91fXNorjutR4VzMt5Ddtbwh9osTFA5HH0kq2m5bL.pdf [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[11] Digital Earth. 2021. ecotronica — Digital Earth. Digital Earth. 18 March. Available at: https://www.digitalearth.art/nolandennis-1/ecotronica [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[12] Digital Earth. [no date]. Susan Schuppli visits Nolan Oswald Dennis — Digital Earth. Available at: https://www.digitalearth.art/nolan-dennis-susan-schuppli [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[13] Digital Earth. [no date]. Susan Schuppli visits Nolan Oswald Dennis — Digital Earth. Available at: https://www.digitalearth.art/nolan-dennis-susan-schuppli [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[14] Delfina Foundation. 2021. Nolan Oswald Dennis. Available at: https://www.delfinafoundation.com/in-residence/nolan-oswald-dennis/ [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[15] Goodman Gallery. [no date]. Goodman gallery. Available at: https://www.goodman-gallery.com/artists/nolan-oswald-dennis#about [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
[16] Zetiz MOCAA. 2024. UNDERSTUDIES. Available at: https://zeitzmocaa.museum/exhibition/exhibitions/understudies/ [Accessed: 29 May 2025].
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