Nolan Oswald Dennis / Furthermore / 2016
Goodman Gallery Cape Town 14 April – 18 May 2016
In Furthermore, his first solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery, Nolan Oswald Dennis continues to explore the ever-fluctuating conditions of place and time. The ostensible certainty of chronology and territory is negated in meticulous line drawings, inscribed wax sculptures and printed textiles of a re-imagined South African Flag.
The idea of becoming forms a major theme in the works, which attest to the still transitional state of South Africa’s fledgling democracy. In speaking about the works, the artists states ‘this is a re-examination of the political technologies of memory and forgetting that are mobilized in the becoming of (South) Africa.’ Becoming, then, is a future state and Dennis’ exhibition marks the process of attempting to determine his own place in the always collapsing social fiction that marks the community of the late rainbow nation.
Artworks
About
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Nolan Oswald Dennis (b. 1988, Zambia) is a para-disciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores what they call ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.
Dennis’ work questions the politics of space (and time) through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach. They are concerned with the hidden structures that pre-determine the limits of our social and political imagination. Through a language of diagrams, drawings and models they explore a hidden landscape of systematic and structural conditions that organise our political sub-terrain. This sub-space is framed by systems which transverse multiple realms (technical, spiritual economic, psychological, etc) and therefore Dennis’ work can be seen as an attempt to stitch these, sometime opposed, sometimes complimentary, systems together. To read technological systems alongside spiritual systems, to combine political fictions with science fiction.
Dennis’ is the 2016 winner of the FNB Arts Prize, and has exhibited in various solo and group shows, including the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016), the Young Congo Biennale (2019), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Architekturmuseum der TU München, Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and ARoS Aarhus (Denmark). They were the 2020 artist in residence at NTUCCA (Singapore) and the 2021 artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation (London).
Dennis’ work featured at the Liverpool Biennale with their installation, ‘no conciliation is possible (working diagram)’ in 2023, as well as Kunsthalle Bern and Van Abbe Museum. Dennis also participated in the 12th edition of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale as well as the ‘back wall project’ at the Kunsthalle Basel.
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