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nolan oswald dennis

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📱 DATAS: The Artists vol. 9

▼ Nolan Oswald Dennis

Dennis rozvíjí koncept „černého vědomí prostoru“, který zkoumá materiální i metafyzické podmínky dekolonizace. Zajímá se o skryté struktury předurčující limity naší imaginace. Žije v Johannesburgu.

▸ vystavená díla:

﹒ Model pro nekonečný sloup (2025)

Dílo odkazuje na cyklus Constantina Brâncușiho Nekonečný sloup (1918) vrstvením glóbů. Každý nese stejnou kartografickou projekci utvářenou koloniální historií a geopolitickým násilím. Zdánlivá neutralita je narušena rozřezáním Země podél rovníku a obrácením orientace. Černý glóbus je prostorem pro nové pojetí budoucností a odmítnutím dominantních západních epistemologií jako nezpochybněného základu pro utváření světa. 
﹒ Možnosti (2019)

„Dějiny se opakují dvakrát: poprvé jako tragédie, podruhé jako fraška,“ tvrdil Karel Marx. Druhá pasáž je v Dennisově díle přeškrtnuta. Tím se otevírá prostor pro strategii, nahodilost a možnost jiného vývoje.

🇪🇺 Projekt DATAS je spolufinancován Evropskou unií z programu Kreativní Evropa.

———

▼ Nolan Oswald Dennis

Artist from Johannesburg explores what they call ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization. They are concerned with the hidden structures that predetermine the limits of our imagination.

▸ exhibited artworks:

﹒ Model for an Endless Column (2025)

The work recalls Constantin Brâncuși’s Endless Column series (1918) by stacking globes. Each bears the same cartographic projection shaped by colonial histories and geopolitical violence. The apparent neutrality is disrupted by cutting the Earth along the equator and inverting its orientation. The black globe opens a space for reimagining futures and rejects dominant Western epistemologies as the unquestioned foundation for world-building.

﹒ Options (2019)

Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself twice: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Dennis crossed the second part. Rather than reduction to repetition or inevitability, his drawing foregrounds recursion and openness within historical processes.

🇪🇺 The DATAS project is co-funded by the European Union under the Creative Europe programme. taken in Galerie Rudolfinum by @data_body

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2 months ago

“The geometry of our revolving planet creates a system of shared stars and secret stars. Some stars are visible only the in night sky of the southern hemisphere and others only in the northern hemisphere. Stars along the ecliptic path bridge the two halves the world’s sky. Shifting from the southern to the northern sky as tour planet travels around the sun. These are solidarity stars, shared between the sky of distance lands, relation-making stars”
From the 2026 @contemporaryartbiennale_sa by @data_body 📸 @by.wizzo taken in Diriyah Jax Riyadh by @data_body

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3 months ago

Nolan Oswald Dennis #Pickedby Alice Bucknell

Nolan Oswald Dennis works in sculpture, diagram, and moving image to explore what they describe as a “black consciousness of space.” Their practice examines the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization, tracing the hidden systems that shape how space, time, and political imagination are structured. Living and working in Johannesburg, Dennis constructs diagrammatic worlds that reveal – and reconfigure – the limits of what can be perceived, known, and imagined.

“Their work feels singular in its expansiveness – cosmopoetic, at once dense and open-ended,” says Alice Bucknell about Nolan. “They move fluidly across sculpture, film, and diagram, tracing Blackness as an unbounded vector. Each project unfolds like a constellation of possible pasts and futures – entangled, in motion, and returning new meanings with each encounter.

“further notes 4 a planet (9 dash) sticks with me: a haptic diagram that undoes its own structure, where language becomes a world-making technology – immediate and infinite.”

@data_body
@secure_channel
@alicebucknell by @data_body

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4 months ago

“Signification is a loop. I am listening to the Earth’s vibrations that travel both across the surface and through the crust, but also through the core, so they complicate the idea of the local,” says Nolan Oswald Dennis (@data_body) in conversation with Zoë Hopkins (@zoelhopkins).

Link in bio to read the conversation from Mousse 95. by @data_body

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4 months ago

We’re excited to round out the first season of our 2025–2027 Focus Theme, 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 with the latest edition of our digital publishing series Post/doc.

Two newly commissioned projects by Johannesburg-based artist Nolan Oswald Dennis (@data_body) and Tbilisi and New York-based artist Levani (Levan Mindiashvili @levanmindi) grapple with oral and aural matter as a microcosm for understanding interpersonal relations during times of political upheaval and dislocation.

In these works, sound—or the question of what one hears vs. what is heard—becomes the matter through which cognitive dissonance is captured, where ruptures in collective memory are made intelligible.

Find Dennis and Levani’s Post/doc projects at the link in our bio!

Post/doc is edited by Re’al Christian (@r_christian__), VLC assistant director of editorial initiatives.

@data_body @levanmindi #MatterofIntelligence

Image Credits:
Nolan Oswald Dennis, Untitled (The land), 2025. Photo by Kristien Daem, courtesy the artist and Kunstinstituut Melly.
Levani (Levan Mindiashvili), what is your form?, 2025, video. Courtesy the artist. by @data_body

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9 months ago

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10 months ago

Exhibition opening Friday, October 24—Nolan Oswald Dennis: 𝘋𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 (𝘪)
Presented with @insite_art

▪️Opening Reception: Friday, October 24, 5:30–8 PM
▪️Conversation between Nolan Oswald Dennis (@data_body) and critic KJ Abudu (@kj_abudu): Friday, October 24, 5:30–6:15 PM
▪️On view: October 25, 2025–January 17, 2026
▪️Location: Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla

INSITE is pleased to announce Nolan Oswald Dennis: 𝘋𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 (𝘪), an exhibition opening this October at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla, CA. Informed by the study of geological and planetary systems, and situated within African and diasporic relations to the land, cosmos, and anti-colonial political structures, Dennis’ work approaches the world as it is while mapping possibilities for transforming it.

𝘋𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 (𝘪) marks the West Coast premiere of 𝘐𝘴𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘯𝘦, an ongoing project that replicates rock specimens from geology museums and university departments in South Africa and parts of the world where the work has been shown. Originally commissioned for INSITE Commonplaces in Johannesburg in 2021, this project has since traveled to the Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, Netherlands; the Swiss Institute in New York; and Gasworks in London.

📸: Photos 1, 3, 5, 6 by Daniel Pérez
Photo 2 courtesy of @goodman_gallery
Photo 4 by Dillion Marsh
Photo 7 by Cedric Mussano taken in Athenaeum Music & Arts Library by @data_body

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a year ago

☄️🪨 Edition Launch: ‘a mass (PRA 04402,23)’ by Nolan Oswald Dennis 🪨☄️

We’re so excited to launch a new edition by artist Nolan Oswald Dennis (@data_body), following his exhibition ‘throwers’, which ran at Gasworks between 24 April - 22 June 2025.

Nolan’s practice traces the connections between science, technology and political history through what they describe as “a black consciousness of space”, an exploration of the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.

This edition, ‘a mass (PRA 04402,23)’, extends Dennis’ ongoing research into “potentially hazardous objects” - near-earth asteroids that periodically pose catastrophic risk to our planet.

Silkscreened onto a stainless steel substrate is a sketch of Dennis’ favourite rock, a meteorite fragment (scientifically named PRA 04402,23) collected in Antarctica in 2004.

Accompanying the edition are nine magnets, each relating to Dennis’ research on representations of stones hurtling through space and time, as well as the act of throwing.

Nolan Oswald Dennis
a mass (PRA 04402,23), 2025
Two-colour silkscreen on stainless steel with nine magnets 30 x 41cm
Edition of 25

Please note that this edition will be dispatched from late October 2025.
Available to purchase now via the Gasworks website - link in bio.

Gasworks regularly produces exclusive limited-edition artworks, publications, and merchandise in collaboration with artists involved in our programmes. These beautiful and affordable artworks are kindly donated by artists and allow us to continue to support emerging artists to research, develop and present new work.

Edition photography by Andy Keate.

#GasworksLondon #GasworksArtists #editions #limitededitions #artforsale #nolanoswalddennis by @data_body

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a year ago

I went to French Guiana expecting to see a rocket and instead found myself called to the absences of Leon G Damas. Guyanese poet, radical anti-assimilationist and co-founder of Negritude. While Cesaire and Senghor are lauded by post/colonial powers - Damas remains uncelebrated in his native land. Maybe the eclipsing of Damas is a feature of his work not a bug. An affect/effect of his insistence on Negritude as the continuity of subversion rather than the rediscovery of identity. Damasian Negritude haunts the re-colonial trajectory of decolonial thought. taken in Cayenne, French Guiana by @data_body

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a year ago

.
the pleasure of photographing another GASWORKS beautiful event 😎📸 Black Earth Study Club at Gasworks Convened around Nolan Oswald Dennis.

@gasworkslondon
@data_body
@homopathic

Photo credit : Tarlan Lotfizadeh @tlphotography.co.uk

@tlphotography.co.uk
@dezreview #dezreview taken in Gasworks by @data_body

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a year ago

📣 Be sure to add ‘throwers’, the first UK solo exhibition by Johannesburg-based artist Nolan Oswald Dennis, to your art calendar.

On view at @gasworkslondon, it includes large-scale murals, intricate diagrams, and a 3D-printed installation. The exhibition investigates the intersections of geology, cosmology, and political histories.

Be sure to join the remaining Black Earth Study Club sessions, which will contextualise the exhibition. Convened by interdisciplinary writer, artist, and curator Imani Mason Jordan, the club invites artists, writers, and scholars to reflect on the topics orbiting Nolan’s practice.

22 May - Ain Bailey (@ain.bailey), Imani Mason Jordan (@homopathic), Elaine Mitchener (@elainemitchener1)
29 May - Christine Kirubi (fakedove_), Imani Mason Jordan (@homopathic), Nikita Sena (@dede.koko)

Book your free tickets to Black Earth Study Club via the link in the Gasworks bio.

🪐 View ‘throwers’ until 22 June 2025
📍Gasworks, London

#NolanOswaldDennis #throwers #Gasworks #ArtExhibition #BlackEarthStudyClub #LondonArt #London by @data_body

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a year ago

Our Koyo, who fought for us with grace and kindness. Siyabulela. Lala ngoxolo by @data_body

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a year ago