What does a “black consciousness of space” seem like? Does it kind a optimistic or a destructive, or elide the 2? And the way concerning the pressure or distinction between a “racialized, propertied world and heterogenous Black and Indigenous imaginaries”? These are a few of the questions you’ll grapple with within the first United States exhibition by Lusaka-born and Johannesburg-based artist Nolan Oswald Dennis, who has a knack for articulating their concepts in highly effective objects that each conceal and reveal their internal logics and contradictions.
In “Articulated globe (pair)” (2024), which can categorical the imaginative and prescient of the exhibition most clearly, two spheres contact in a way that means camaraderie or care. One, a traditional world globe turned the wrong way up, leans into the opposite, a black model coated with a cowry shell veil, in what we might think about is a becoming a member of of worlds. That in-betweenness is what excites the artist, who explores pre- and postcolonial worlds inside a framework that means not the teleology of 1 changing into the opposite however slightly a worldview of the 2 as contemporaneous and interlocking.
Regardless of a few of the philosophical influences of their work, which can counsel in any other case — chief amongst them Jamaican author Sylvia Wynter, who guides our focus towards the pure world to counter what she phrases the “overrepresentation of Man” — object-making remains to be foundational to Dennis’s apply. These objects are prodding, generally asking the viewer to think about non-existent variations comparable to their inverse or new iterations, and generally incomplete, like “Isivivane” (2023–ongoing), by which a 3D printer recreates rock fragments from world wide, together with Australia, Palestine, and South Africa. Within the context of the museum or artwork area, that copy of components or relics touches on conversations round restitution and means that we are sometimes caught on the floor, slightly than probing what lies under.
Set up view of Nolan Oswald Dennis: overturns with “Approximations (1)” (2021) to the left; “Black Liberation Zodiac (Kgositsile’s Folly)” (2022–ongoing) at middle; and a partial view of “Isivivane” (2023–ongoing) on the again proper
In “further notes 4 a planet (nine-dash)” (2024), necklaces of letter beads join panels of phrases like a switchboard channeling us to a unique idea of actuality. It appeared just like the work could possibly be interactive, so I requested the attendant if I might contact it. They stated no, because the necklaces are apparently too delicate for the viewers to deal with. That invitation to reimagine — and the flexibility to withhold — is an apt approach to see how artwork can promise the unattainable, creating areas which have by no means existed earlier than whereas demanding we comply with sure guidelines to be granted entry.
One of many many sentences that seem on a display in “Approximations (1)” (2021) is “discovery is code word for forgetting”; one other is the title to this evaluation. Rituals of studying and unlearning drive us to push ahead and alter, overturning what we all know in favor of asking about what we don’t, and ready for the reply, if it ever comes.
Nolan Oswald Dennis: overturns continues on the Swiss Institute (38 St. Mark’s Place, East Village, Manhattan) till April 13. The exhibition was curated by KJ Abudu.
