Goodman Gallery is pleased to present conditions, Nolan Oswald Dennis’ third solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery.
The exhibition presents a new series of works centered around the figure of the globe. Incorporating the shape into various configurations, Dennis presents different perspectives on our familiar world as a means toward imagining new possibilities.
“Within this burning planet has always existed another world, and the struggle to realise it,” says Dennis. “The logic of colonial cosmology insists on the universality of the Western world: a planet rendered as private property, as social violence, as deliberate crisis. Occupying the same space and time as the colonial planet are other worlds. A planet rendered whole as indigenous land and life; a queer planet rendered just, feminist, socialist; a planet facing south, and east, and waterward. Altogether an ecology of black planets – a black cosmography (where black is a vector that opens toward hidden conditions of space and time).”
Nolan Oswald Dennis (b. 1988, Lusaka, 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.
In 2024, Dennis designed the ‘Traces of Ecstasy’ pavilion and exhibition project for the Lagos Biennial in Tafawa Balewa Square. An adapted version of this project was on view at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in the same year. Dennis was also shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2023/24.
Dennis was the 2020 artist in residence at NTUCCA (Singapore) and the 2021 artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation (London). They were awarded the FNB Arts Prize in 2016. They are a founding member of artist groups NTU and the Index Literacy Program, as well as a research associate at the VIAD research centre at the University of Johannesburg.
Solo shows include: UNDERSTUDIES, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2024); Nolan Oswald Dennis, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); Positions #7, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2023); models (from a black planetarium), Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2022); Specifications for a Reverse Archaeology, The Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (2022-2023); conditions, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2021); Options, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, (2019).
Group shows and biennales include: Black Ancient Futures, Museum of Art, Architechture and Technology, Lisbon (2024); back wall project, Kunsthalle Basel (2024); 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023); the 12th Liverpool Biennial (2023), Frieze, Seoul (2023); the Young Congo Biennale (2019), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, MACBA (2018); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; ARoS Aarhus, Denmark; 9th Berlin Biennale (2016); Poetics of Relation, LIYH, Geneva (2015).
Collections include: A4 Arts Foundation Cape Town, South Africa and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Dennis lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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