Over the past three years, Nolan Oswald Dennis has gained significant international recognition, showcasing their diagrammatic and collaborative practice at two prominent Swiss museums in 2024 alone. The artist’s probative, sometimes opaque work—a mix of drawing, sculpture, film, and installation—also appeared in recent editions of biennales in Dakar, Liverpool, São Paulo, and Shanghai. These career milestones were bookended in late 2024 by an event closer to home: the artist’s first museum solo exhibition in South Africa. Organized by Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCAA, “Understudies” offers a broad overview of Dennis’s multifaceted practice, its speculative methods, iterative processes, rootedness in collaboration, and overall inclination towards “keeping a question open for as long as possible,” as the artist put it to me during a series of online conversations and email exchanges.
Curated by Thato Mogotsi, Dennis’s early-career survey includes small drawings on grid paper, variously sized hard and soft sculptures portraying globes (a recurring motif in their practice), a low-tech receipt printer issuing aphoristic chunks of text by anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, as well as a drawing installation depicting a celestial body. The selection affirms the importance of models, diagrams, annotations, and simulations as forms for prompting critical thinking. Partly inspired by the artist’s training as an architect, Dennis is attracted to these “partial objects” and “dependent” forms because they “require a third party to pick up and complete, or not.”
