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“Diagrams are a language that a kind of Western technical program has sneakily captured. Diagrams sit uncomfortably in technical space in the sense that diagrams are really like a kind of false witness. They reinstate the spiral. They twist the world into poetic and political configurations that are grounded more in acts of relation than facts of apprehension. They’re more testimony than witness,” Nolan Oswald Dennis (@data_body) tells Kameelah Janan Rasheed (@kameelahr) in their interview for our most recent Dialogues. “In the literature around the philosophy of logic, they really do not want people to be doing diagrammatic thinking because diagrammatic thinking creates connections without clarifying them. There’s a real tension between an essayistic or even mathematical language and diagrammatic language because essayistic language and mathematical language are formally linear. There’s a beginning, there’s an end, and there’s clear directionality. But diagrams really complicate this because their lines betray directionality and produce connection without being precise about its nature. They are overly dependent on interpretation.” Read more about the methodological dimension of paradisciplinarity, Dennis’s use of precovery, and the possibilities for diagrammatic thinking in their full conversation at https://foundwork.art/dialogues  Pictured here: “Black Liberation Zodiac (Molalatladi + Maselatheko),” 2024; wallpaper installation. Photograph by Dillion Marsh at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, 2025. #NolanOswaldDennis #KameelahJananRasheed #foundworkart #foundworkdialogues
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Collection as Cosmos is an exhibition research companion that brings together manuals, essays, and visual documentation to think differently about how art—and time itself—might be organized. At its heart is the Van Abbemuseum’s collection of modern and contemporary art, whose histories, contradictions, and possibilities become fertile ground for imagining other ways of living with the past, present, and future. Departing from the linear structures that tend to organize museum collections, the book takes up the Greek root of kosmos, meaning both order and decoration. Materials gather like star clusters across time, forming constellations around four artistic practices and temporal propositions: Regenerative Time, Unchronological Time,Public Time, and Cosmic Times. Through questions of grief and mourning, personal and institutional histories, rest and recuperation, and celestial and agricultural knowledge, these constellations offer different ways of contending with modernity. Made for those who have encountered the collection display and those who may never have the chance, Collection as Cosmos offers a departure point for finding more just and joyful ways of living in our shared everyday. BIG shout out to the mighty contributors, we give thanks!Contributors: ARAC @africacluster (@mmatseleng, @pplessie, and @giftedcarrot); @fieryapirl; @data_body; Dr. A.F. Philips Observatory; @noartjustlols; @alicesparklykat; @i_a_okon; @ontkruidenier; @stevententhije; @yatnurt; Chantal Kleinmeulman; Unchronological Time narrators (Cis Van Abbe, Ine ter Bogt, Marjan van Geffen, Family Lo, Petra Holten, Peter Kentie, Age Opdam, Ward Rennen, Ronald Rijnen, and Rob Schoonen)and @yanghaegue Book design: @studio.pupilla; Publisher: @k_verlag with Van Abbemuseum; Distribution: @ideabooksnl @artdata_london Editor: @yolandezolazolivanderheide Editorial Team: @defneayas___, @fieryapirl, Chantal Kleinmeulman, @stevententhije, @yatnurt Foreword: @defneayas___ Editing: @janineee English to Dutch Translation: Anna Tchitcherine Dutch Copy-Editing & Proofreading @pernilla.ellens , Tijs Heesrebeek Exhibition Spatial Design: @matildecassani_
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We’re so happy to announce our next Dialogues: Nolan Oswald Dennis (@data_body) in conversation with Kameelah Janan Rasheed (@kameelahr).  “The idea of paradisciplinary, it’s not so much a relationship to the discipline, but how these disciplines can be used for something else. My orientation to disciplines and disciplinarity overall is more to do with what I find promising or possible, in the intimacy they have with the object of their interest,” Dennis tells Rasheed in their full interview at https://foundwork.art/dialogues.  Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner and death doula-in-training. She explores the poetics and politics of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual communication systems. Her work explores gestures of noise, disobedience, excess, and unintelligibility that generate friction within systems that demand efficiency and immediate legibility. In this exploration, she is curious about methods that nurture elastic ways of (un)knowing. Her work strives not only to make art objects, but also to create situations — rituals — substrates for continued learning and refusal. Rasheed serves as the inaugural Charles Gaines Chair at @calarts and as a critic @yaleschoolofart. She has exhibited internationally and received several honors. Nolan Oswald Dennis is a paradisciplinary artist from Johannesburg. Their practice explores what they call ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization. Dennis’s work questions the politics of space (and time) through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach. They are concerned with the hidden structures that predetermine the limits of our social and political imagination. Through a language of diagrams, drawings and models they explore a hidden landscape of systematic and structural conditions that organize our political sub-terrain. Dennis has exhibited at @gasworkslondon, @swissinstitute,@kunstinstituutmelly, and @goodman_gallery, among others. Seen here: “Model for an Endless Column” (detail), 2025. Photo: Ondřej Polák @galeriefudolfinum. #NolanOswaldDennis #KameelahJananRasheed #foundworkart #foundworkdialogues
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‼️Apply now: Mensch Maschine VISIT Residency Programme 2027 ENERGY GHOSTS, Deadline: 1 December 2026, 23:59 *Deutsch in den Kommentaren In 2027, the JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der Künste, VISIT, the artist in residency programme of the E.ON Foundation, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art and E-WERK Luckenwalde will offer four fully funded fellowships to international artists for the Mensch Maschine residency programme. The call for proposals is aimed at projects at the intersection of art, energy and ecology, which integrate realities, stories, histories, and myths from Europe and around the world, that address the social, political, natural, and cultural challenges of our time. Check out our 🔗 link in bio for the full open call text and the application link. Meet the jury: Nolan Oswald Dennis @data_body, artist and researcher Chus Martinez @the_chus_martinez, Head of the Institute Art Gender Nature, associate curator of TBA21 Sarah Johanna Theurer @sarahjohanna.t, Curator of Contemporary Art at Fondation Beyeler Anh-Linh Ngo @anhlinh.ngo, Vice President of the Akademie der Künste, architecture theorist and curator Tiara Roxanne @tiara_roxanne_, Berlin-based scholar and artist Clemens von Wedemeyer @vwedemeyer, artist and member of the Akademie der Künste Design: @basics09 Mensch Maschine is a partnership programme with the JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der Künste, the artist in residency programme VISIT of the E.ON Foundation, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw and E-WERK Luckenwalde.
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Science and spirituality often take turns explaining the world. Where one is prominent the other keeps to a respectful silence, but this kind of separation is only a recent development. This is the curatorial foundation of “Prayers to Fornax: Science, Technology, and Spirituality,” the first exhibition mounted by one of the two Hyundai Blue Prize+ 2025 awardee collectives at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing. In her review of the exhibition for Artlab Editorial, writer and critic Yue Ren (@spicy_gluten_), describes how art––like science and spirituality––push us towards the edges of our own imagination and understanding. Ren’s survey of the art on view asks who gets to explain the world and spotlights the standout works that offer multiple answers. Read Yue Ren’s review of “Prayers to Fornax: Science, Technology, and Spirituality” on Artlab Editorial. Link in bio.
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Looking back at A Machine as Complex as the World Itself 💛 What is the strangest tool you use in your life or work, and what does it allow you to do? We asked Lars Bang Larsen, Lua Vollaard, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Simone Kotva, James Bridle, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Marcus Coates during our gathering at Korskirken in Bergen. At the gathering’s heart was a desire to approach technology as an ancestral and ongoing practice of world-making, extending far beyond the horizon of computation. While technology has become synonymous with the digital, the gathering returned to its broader relationship with tools, techniques and forms of practical knowledge. Learn more about A Machine as Complex as the World Itself, via the link in our bio! Convenors @luciapietroiusti_ @filipaaaaaaaaaaa Contributors @keikreutler @fangedluamena @alicebucknell @carolynchristovbakargiev @marcus_coates_ @data_body @fixednomadic @drsimonekotva @smdcem @ellen.viste #larsbanglarsen #jamesbridle Film by Stian Servoss @servoss
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Nolan Oswald Dennis: Ecliptics 🌌💫 Now available for purchase! This first monograph on Lusaka-born, Johannesburg-based Nolan Oswald Dennis (@data_body) is inspired by their exploration of a “black consciousness of space,” traversing various realms from fiction, linguistics, and metaphysics to astronomy, mathematics, and technology, as well as Black, Indigenous and anti-imperial intellectual traditions, to consider the planetary conditions for a decolonized future. Offering an introduction to Dennis’s “para-disciplinary” art practice through an elaboration of the political histories, scientific frameworks, and critical theoretical discourses that inform it, the book features newly commissioned texts, a conversation, and reprinted texts by a global constellation of artists and theorists. Text by KJ Abudu (@kj_abudu), Renée Green, Thato Mogotsi (@_thatomogotsi_), Zoé Samudzi (@babywasu), Sylvia Wynter, Denise Ferreira da Silva (@livingcommons), Calvin Warren, J. Kameron Carter (@thelonial_monk), Panashe Chigumadzi (@panashechigumadzi), Santu Mofokeng, Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Karen Barad, Mogobe Ramose, Selby Mvusi, Raafat Majzoub (@raafatmajzoub), Masande Ntshanga (mntshanga), Alice Sparkly Kat (@alicesparklykat), la paperson, Quito Swan, Luciana Parisi and Ezekiel Dixon Román (@ezekieldixonroman). Publisher: Swiss Institute, Zeitz MOCAA (@zeitzmocaa), Walther König (@buchhandlungwaltherfranzkoenig) Editor: KJ Abudu, Alison Coplan (@alicopes), Thato Mogotsi Format: Softcover Dimensions: 8.5 in x 11 in Pages: 330 pgs / 130 color / 20 b&w ISBN: 9783753308524 🔗 Purchase via link in bio #swissinstitute #zeitzmocaa #waltherkönig #nolanoswalddennis
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#BiennaleArte2026 | #InMinorKeys: Arsenale “Per la Biennale Arte 2026, Nolan Oswald Dennis tende l’orecchio, per così dire, alla terra, ricercando i suoni che ribollono al suo interno. Le opere BLACK EARTH CALENDAR e BLACK WATER STATION (MBARARA) sono costituite da una serie di reti di sensori sismici open source situati nel continente africano, tra cui uno nello studio stesso dell’artista. Questa tecnologia rileva le vibrazioni acustiche a bassissima frequenza della crosta terrestre, che i geofisici utilizzano per comprenderne la composizione materiale.” Visita la 61. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte a Venezia fino al 22 novembre! Scopri di più e acquista il biglietto → www.labiennale.org - link in bio --- “For the Biennale Arte 2026, Nolan Oswald Dennis (@data_body) presses an ear to the earth, so to speak, reaching for the sound that riots therein. BLACK EARTH CALENDAR and BLACK WATER STATION (MBARARA) are assembled from a series of open‐source seismic sensing arrays located on the African continent (including one in the artist’s studio). This technology detects extremely low‐frequency acoustic vibrations in the earth’s crust, which geophysicists use to discern its material makeup.” Visit the 61st International Art Exhibition in Venice until November 22! Find out more and buy your tickets → www.labiennale.org - link in bio #LaBiennaleDiVenezia #BiennaleArte 📹 @c3tecnologie
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Looking back at A Machine as Complex as the World Itself 💚 Earlier this September, we gathered in Bergen for two days of talks, performances, film, music, listening exercises and conversations, convened by Filipa Ramos and Lucia Pietroiusti. Here is a glimpse back at the gathering and some of the many contributions that shaped the two days. Thank you to James Bridle, Alice Bucknell, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcus Coates, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Simone Ghetti, Simone Kotva, Kei Kreutler, Lars Bang Larsen, Chiemi Shimada, Ellen Viste, Lua Vollaard, and Mark Thomas Young for joining us! Learn more about A Machine as Complex as the World Itself via the link in our bio. Convenors @luciapietroiusti_ @filipaaaaaaaaaaa Contributors @keikreutler #jamesbridle @fangedluamena @alicebucknell @carolynchristovbakargiev @marcus_coates_ @data_body @fixednomadic @drsimonekotva @smdcem @ellen.viste #larsbanglarsen Funders @bergen.kommune @kulturradet @vestlandfylke @norwayinuk @norgeisverige @norwegenindeutschland @norwayinpoland @norwayinromania @norwayinportugal Film by Stian Servoss @servoss
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Zambia visit: Livingstone 2 Mosi Oa Tunya Perennial by @loca.zm, one of the main reasons for my re-visit to Zambia, was launched on 12 Sep. This large scale event of contemporary arts from Sep 2026 to Mar 2027 is “Bringing together artists, curators, researchers, musicians, filmmakers, archivists, historians and cultural practitioners from across Africa and around the world, the Perennial proposes a new model for international exhibition-making rooted in the histories, ecologies and movements of Southern Africa.” (LoCA) Following the launch with keynote by Prof. karî’kachä seid’ou, there were a roundtable of @earn_admin (Expanded Artistic Research Network); a public activation of LabARD (Laboratory for Decolonial Art and Research); and panel discussions with exhibiting artists, held between LoCA and Fallsway Warehouse. What urged me to be here is not only that this is the first-of-its-kind mega-scale international exhibition in Zambia, but also how LoCA radically testifies “perenniality” as a different mode of international exhibition-making from established “biennial” format. According to LoCA, it adopts the idea of perennial movement of animals and people throughout the history of the region and the present day, while seeking a way in which sustainability of resources, economy and agency occurs. Coming from Japan/Scotland where arts festivals happening all the time, although I “thought” I understood Perennial’s concept, it was proven I did not at all. As a visitor and almost newborn to the Zambian arts community, I felt frustration/confusion due to lack of information or pre-existing circles. But it’s because my mindset was still in biennial where I can be a guest to be hosted. In this Perennial, which was informed by the “lack” Zambian art community face, there is no guest/host dynamic. Each of us comes as a self-driven animal at own risk and responsibility. Just like encountering an elephant in bush, we respect each other’s existence, pace and territory and seek mutually beneficial exchange. The central here is knowledge and meaning that we can produce through gathering. Perennial hasn’t been set: across seasons, it organically unfolds, shifts and renew
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This year, I was invited alongside a team of curators to work on an exhibition on the history of cartography. The brief was simple, the method was not, to bring contemporary artworks into dialogue with historical loans; to move between European mappae mundi and Islamic cosmographies; to speak of the present while remaining situated within the historic. In working on the exhibition, the map often disappeared as an object of measurement and reappeared as a vessel for fantasy, memory and belonging. What we found was the same persistent fiction, recurring across cultures and centuries, of that which unites us, and that which divides us, all born from the same allegorical myth. _________ "A Necessary Fiction: Art, Maps & the Models of Our World" - Venice, May, 5 - November, 22, 2026 The exhibition is conceived as a journey into the fictive nature of cartography, and the enduring role of narrative in shaping what we hold to be true. It treats cartography as a cultural and political device, capable of translating reality into fictional systems of representation charged with imagination and ideology. Rather than positioning cartography from a place of truth, it speculates on the innately arbitrary nature of truth in the cartographic, reminding us of the role of fiction in manifesting our collective reality. These intricate creations, composed of historical maps, memoirs, objects and contemporary artworks, manifest political and religious thought, mythological visions, and the delicate interplay of scientific inquiry with belief. Co-curators: Aurora Fonda & Sara Almutlaq Associate curators: @aminabdiab & @zaira.carrer Scenography: @nimportekii @bianca_pedron Installation views featuring works by: @aseelalyaqoub @moniraism @wael_shawky @albinali.arts @data_body @ahmedmater @tavaresstrachan @reenakallat Photo Credit 1,3,4,5,6,7,9: @_marcocappelletti @marcocappellettistudio Photo Credit 2,8: @markblower
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