Zeitz MOCAA presents UNDERSTUDIES, the first major South African museum solo exhibition by artist Nolan Oswald Dennis, who lives and works in Johannesburg.
The exhibition embraces and maintains a dialogue with the artist’s longstanding para-disciplinary approach. Interested in the fraught history of scientific representation and intervention, the artist encourages us to think of artworks as models, diagrams, hypothetical annotations and simulations rather than sculptures, drawings and installations. The exhibition opens October 8, 2024 on Level 3, Elevator Side of the museum and runs until 25 May 2025.
The Landing series by Goodman Galley will continue to further the dialogue around these influential figures and their enduring impact on the artistic landscape. This further aligns with the gallery’s efforts to reframe and expand art history.
Nolan Oswald Dennis was born in 1988 in Lusaka, Zambia. Dennis holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand (2012) and a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (2018). The artist’s practice explores the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonisation, questioning the politics of space and time through a system-specific approach. Their practice recombines social, technical, political and spiritual systems grounded in a planetary condition of landlessness and guided by the overlapping theories and practices of black, indigenous and queer liberation.
Featured in the exhibition are artworks that re-perform propositions about geology (land and landlessness) and cosmology (local knowledge and the multiverse) that have come to inform the political arc of the artist’s practice.
Embedded within the logic of Dennis’s artistic practice is an interrogation of systems and fields of knowledge. Dennis redirects geological techniques like stratigraphy to read time and place through layers of the earth, revealing personal and political fictions about our proximity and connection to land.
UNDERSTUDIES offers a series of propositions to reconceive our own relationship to forms of instruction and authority. Through a set of conceptual devices, the artist’s practice subverts and contends with universalised and exclusionary perceptions of the “known” world.
On display in the exhibition is a new configuration of the widely-travelled, wall installation titled Black Liberation Zodiac (Molalatladi)(2018–ongoing) which features iconography of Black and African liberation archives and its shared histories that, when mapped onto the southern hemisphere night sky, offer a counter system for thinking about global, celestial and universal relations.
Featured Artworks
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Artist Bio
Nolan Oswald Dennis (b. 1988, Lusaka, Zambia) is a para-disciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores what they call ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization. Dennis’ 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 organise our political sub-terrain.
In 2025, Dennis presented their first UK institutional solo exhibition at Gasworks London, and their first US institutional solo exhibition at the Swiss Institute. On the occasion of the exhibition, the Swiss Institute together with Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town and Koenig will publish the first ever monograph on Dennis’s practice in April 2025.
In 2024, Dennis designed the 'Traces of Ecstasy' pavilion and exhibition project for the Lagos Biennial in Tafawa Balewa Square. An adapted version of this project was on view at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in the same year. Dennis was also shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2023/24.
Dennis was the 2020 artist in residence at NTUCCA (Singapore) and the 2021 artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation (London). They were awarded the FNB Arts Prize in 2016. They are a founding member of artist groups NTU and the Index Literacy Program, as well as a research associate at the VIAD research centre at the University of Johannesburg.
Solo shows include: Nolan Oswald Dennis, Gasworks London (2025); overturns, Swiss Institute, New York (2025); UNDERSTUDIES, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2024); geo-logics, Kunstinsituut Melly, Netherlands (2024); Nolan Oswald Dennis, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); Positions #7, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2023); models (from a black planetarium), Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2022); Specifications for a Reverse Archaeology, The Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (2022-2023); conditions, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2021); Options, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, (2019).
Group shows and biennales include: Black Ancient Futures, Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon (2024); back wall project, Kunsthalle Basel (2024); 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023); the 12th Liverpool Biennial (2023), Frieze, Seoul (2023); the Young Congo Biennale (2019), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, MACBA (2018); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; ARoS Aarhus, Denmark; 9th Berlin Biennale (2016); Poetics of Relation, LIYH, Geneva (2015).
Collections include: A4 Arts Foundation Cape Town, South Africa and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Dennis lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
