Nolan Oswald Dennis

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.