UNDERSTUDIES by Nolan Oswald Dennis at Zeitz MOCAA is the first major South African museum solo exhibition by the artist, who lives and works in Johannesburg.
The exhibition embraces and maintains a dialogue with the artist’s longstanding para-disciplinary approach. Interested in the fraught history of scientific representation and intervention, the artist encourages us to think of artworks as models, diagrams, hypothetical annotations and simulations rather than sculptures, drawings and installations.
Nolan Oswald Dennis was born in 1988 in Lusaka, Zambia. The artist’s practice explores the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonisation, questioning the politics of space and time through a system-specific approach. Their practice recombines social, technical, political and spiritual systems grounded in a planetary condition of landles. Using indexical, analytic and educational devices as tools for rehearsal rather than tools for instruction, the artist suggests that the meaning of these artworks should emerge from the multiple relations between objects in the exhibition and the world outside of it. For Dennis, the exhibition environment often serves as a site for experimentation, producing long cycles of work rather than individualised objects. Featured in the exhibition are artworks that re-perform propositions about geology (land and landlessness) and cosmology (local knowledge and the multiverse) that have come to inform the political arc of the artist’s practice and guided by the overlapping theories and practices of black, indigenous and queer liberation.
Embedded within the logic of Dennis’s artistic practice is an interrogation of systems and fields of knowledge. Dennis redirects geological techniques like stratigraphy to read time and place through layers of the earth, revealing personal and political fictions about our proximity and connection to land.
UNDERSTUDIES foregrounds the artist’s impulse to work within and against grammars of world-making, questioning where power and knowledge are located.
- UNDERSTUDIES forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA that bring into focus and contextualise the practices of artists from Africa and the Diaspora.
Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by Gucci, the Mellon Foundation, and BMW South Africa.
WHAT: Nolan Oswald Dennis – UNDERSTUDIES
WHERE: Zeitz MOCAA, Silo District, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: Opening 8 October 2024 and running until 25 May 2025
INFO: E communications@zeitzmocaa.museum | VISIT | See also Cape Town Green Map | see also Zeitz MOCAA Silo Centenary Celebrations
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