Davis describes this tendency as emblematic of a broader contemporary aesthetic he terms “post-colonial post-conceptualism,” in which artists excavate charged historical symbols and reframe them through museum-like displays that are reflective rather than didactic. Dennis, however, pushes that language further than most. Their projects rarely settle for critique alone; instead, they imagine entirely new epistemologies and cosmologies.
This expansive vision has resonated strongly across the global exhibition circuit. Between 2022 and 2026, Dennis participated in major recurring exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial, the Shanghai Biennale, the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, and the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, culminating in inclusion in the 61st Venice Biennale curated by the late Koyo Kouoh.
Among the most significant recent presentations was Dennis’s design for the Traces of Ecstasy pavilion at the 2024 Lagos Biennial, an immersive environment responding to histories of post-colonial resistance and social transformation. The project later traveled to the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, further expanding the artist’s international reach.
Dennis’s rise also reflects the growing visibility of artistic networks emerging from the African continent and diaspora. In 2023, the collective NTU — co-founded by Dennis alongside artists Bogosi Sekhukhuni and Tabita Rezaire — received a retrospective at Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. The exhibition positioned the group’s collaborative practice within a wider movement of artists engaging technology, spirituality, and decolonial thought through speculative aesthetics.
What distinguishes Dennis from many contemporaries is the extraordinary balance their work achieves between intellectual rigor and symbolic resonance. Their installations can feel at once archaeological and futuristic, rooted in histories of extraction and dispossession while gesturing toward radically different futures. Scientific diagrams become liberation maps; rocks become cosmological archives; soil becomes political memory.
For ACT, Dennis’s prominence on the international stage underscores the program’s long-standing investment in artists whose practices move fluidly across disciplines and geographies. As global biennials increasingly turn toward questions of colonial history, ecology, infrastructure, and collective futures, Dennis’s work has emerged not merely as timely, but foundational to the visual language of the present moment.
If the last four years are any indication, Nolan Oswald Dennis is no longer simply participating in the biennial circuit: they are helping define it.
