Nolan Oswald Dennis
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).
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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
On SYM | BIO | ART
CEION is an experimental reading apparatus inspired by Audre Lorde’s seminal essay “The Uses of the Erotic” and Toni cade Bamabara’s essay “On the Issue of Roles”. A series of local language translations of essays from Lorde’s “Sister Outsider” are used as a growth medium for Southern African wildflowers alongside various fungi and moles ambient in the atmosphere of the exhibition. These essay-flower assemblages are cultivated in a series of light, temperature, and humidity controlled modules connected by a hand powered water reticulation system. The whole apparatus is sustained by its relation to the public following a set of care protocols which blur the distinction between maintenance, production and consumption.
Nolan Oswald Dennis, CEION (2022), African Wildflower seeds, closed environment, bioactive system, grow lights, books, plant domes, community of ambient microorganisms, care protocols; Dimensions variable
