Isivivane/Superpositions

Nolan Oswald Dennis, (b. 1988, Lusaka, Zambia) is an interdisciplinary artist working from Johannesburg, South Africa. Nolan’s practice explores what they refer to as ‘a black consciousness of space: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonisation.’ Their work questions the politics of space and time through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach.

Nolan is concerned with the hidden structures that condition our social and political imagination, which transverse multiple realms (technical, spiritual, economic, psychological, etc) and works to produce counter-diagrams of these, sometimes opposed, sometimes complimentary systems.

Their project, Superpositions, explores the political and spiritual history of the land in South Africa as a necessary framework for how we encounter, understand, and transform our planet. Taking inspiration from conversations with geologists and geology museum curators, superpositions is a series of experimental gestures for a space where dispossession, racialization and restitution are important parts of how we think about the world on a geological scale: a planetary science also known as reparation. Working with digital and physical simulations of geological objects this work offers itself as a platform for collectively learning a way back to another world.