Nolan Oswald Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist. His practice explores ‘black consciousnesses of space’, i.e. the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.
Born in Lusaka, Zambia and raised in Midrand, South Africa, he holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and a Master’s of Science in Art, Culture, and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work questions politics of space and time through a system-specific, rather than site-specific, approach. He is interested in systems which transverse multiple realms (technical, spiritual, economic, psychological, etc.) and works toward an entanglement of these systems.
*
Nolan Oswald Dennis approaches the planet as the common ground upon which multiple worlds can coexist, symbiotically or in conflict. Working against a hegemonic world which defines the planet as property, Dennis recognises world-making as an act of resistance that must entangle material and discursive elements in order to ‘world’ differently. In this light Dennis centres his project on planetary agglomerations of fertile soil, colloquially called ‘black earth’, and in forms of collective thinking known as ‘black study’. This project engages with the planet from a position of estrangement, where access to the planet as a spiritual-material object has been denied, and proposes reengineering tools and methods of measuring, monitoring, modelling, and otherwise remotely accessing the world for a project of alternative planetary imagination linking black and indigenous techno-cultures in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.