What does a “black consciousness of space” appear like? Does it type a constructive or a unfavorable, or elide the 2? And the way in regards to the rigidity or distinction between a “racialized, propertied world and heterogenous Black and Indigenous imaginaries”? These are a number 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 interior 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 fashion that means camaraderie or care. One, a traditional world globe turned the wrong way up, leans into the opposite, a black model lined with a cowry shell veil, in what we may 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 turning into the opposite however reasonably a worldview of the 2 as contemporaneous and interlocking.
Regardless of a number 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 observe. These objects are prodding, generally asking the viewer to think about non-existent variations resembling their inverse or new iterations, and generally incomplete, like “Isivivane” (2023–ongoing), by which a 3D printer recreates rock fragments from around the globe, together with Australia, Palestine, and South Africa. Within the context of the museum or artwork house, that replica of elements or relics touches on conversations round restitution and means that we are sometimes caught on the floor, reasonably than probing what lies beneath.
Set up view of Nolan Oswald Dennis: overturns with “Approximations (1)” (2021) to the left; “Black Liberation Zodiac (Kgositsile’s Folly)” (2022–ongoing) at heart; 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 may 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 solution 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 screen in “Approximations (1)” (2021) is “discovery is code word for forgetting”; one other is the title to this overview. 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.
