Nolan Oswald Dennis

Reverse, Forward, All at Once is an inverted cartographic journey where questions of form and formlessness are experienced over time and in space. The project interrogates the systematic problems of ordering knowledge and pushes the boundaries of what it can mean to critically produce within formalized and less formal art spaces. The projects of artists Nolan Oswald Dennis (SMACT ’18) and Nyakallo Maleke form part of COMMONPLACES which is partly staged within SCENORAMA, a new collaborative platform at Javett-UP. Both artists approach their work as a form of thinking in reverse or tracing backwards in order to return to a yet unknowable universe. Nyakallo’s installation titled The Things We Made For The Things That We Did Not Know poses questions around unknown vocabularies, things made for pleasure and joy, things made when moving between spaces and ongoing elements and obsessions that have the potential to carry knowledge. For his work, Isivivane/Superpositions Nolan takes inspiration from conversations with geologists and geology museum curators to create experimental gestures for a space where dispossession, racialization, and restitution are important parts of how we think about the world in a geological scale: a planetary science also known as repatriation.

Nolan Oswald Dennis, Isivivane/Superpositions, 2023.

About the artist:
Nolan Oswald Dennis (SMACT ’18) 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.

Nolan Oswald Dennis, Isivivane/Superpositions, 2023.

About INSITE:
Since 2019, INSITE has been working on several new platforms that include curatorial projects, artist commissions, publications, conversations, and productions based on the INSITE Archive.

Founded in 1992, INSITE privileges the long-term engagement of artists developing new works conceived for specific sites and political-social contexts. Through collaborations among artists, cultural agents, institutions, and communities, the conceptual framework of INSITE is rooted in the notion of the public—both in the context of experiences, interventions, and installations in the public domain, and of geographical spaces that have inspired artists to imagine the civic and social arena.

INSITE Commonplaces began in March 2021 as a new platform for producing work with curators, artists, and communities, working locally in different regions of the world. Miguel A. López developed a project from Lima, Peru; curator Gabi Ngcobo from Johannesburg, South Africa; and Andrea Torreblanca from San Diego County and Baja California, US/Mexico.