Biography

Nolan Oswald Dennis is a para-disciplinary artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores “a black consciousness of space” – the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization – questioning histories of space and time through system-specific, rather than site-specific interventions. They hold a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and a Science Master’s degree in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

They work within, and against, a grammar of world-ordering: using indexical, analytic and educational devices: drawings, diagrams, maps, models, etc. as devices for rehearsing possible relations instead forms of description. Their practice recombines social, technical, political and spiritual systems grounded in a planetary condition of landlessness and guided by the overlapping theories and practices of black, indigenous and queer liberation. Their work has been featured in exhibitions at the Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town, London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), MACBA (Barcelona), AutoItalia SouthEast (London), CAN (Neuchatel), the Young Congo Biennale (Kinshasa), FRONT triennial (Columbus) among others. They are a founding member of artist group NTU, a research associate at the VIAD research centre at the University of Johannesburg, and a member of the Index Literacy Program.

ARTIST STATEMENT

What must be done in order to know the world (and also ourselves) differently? We could say this other-world-knowledge (more correctly ‘actual-world-knowledge’) is a condition for the kind of material change that both Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon write towards. Part of how my works attend to that question is to create conditions of thinking that extend beyond the horizon of western conventions. This means thinking as a collective act, thinking as distributed and embodied action in collaboration with others.

Translation suggests ways of thinking in dialogue with other worlds that include the microbial, the spiritual, the technological, the world of memory and forgetting. My works are experimental in the poetic sense, a generative process of accumulating methods and techniques, ways and means, not in the scientific sense of testing a hypothesis. Knowing is embodied and inseparable from the knower – knowledge disembodies what is known and allows it to move independently of any specific person. We could ask: What is lost when knowledge moves in this disembodied way? What is left behind? There is violence here, so we should also ask: What is gained, and by whom?