Nolan

Oswald

Dennis’s

Galactic

Reset

The artist makes the case for an African understanding of the cosmos

Scientists once anticipated that 99942 Apophis, a near-Earth asteroid appropriately named after Apophis, the Ancient Egyptian god of disorder, would strike and potentially destroy the planet in April 2029. Concerns have since waned: if the rock makes contact, it won’t be for at least 100 years. But it is still close enough to our orbit for scientists to categorise it as a ‘potentially hazardous object’ (PHO), consecrating it within the uncomfortable ambit of uncertain questions and contingent risk. I learned about 99942 Apophis through the art of Nolan Oswald Dennis, which moves within this refractory orbit of the hazardous. Born in Lusaka and based in Johannesburg, Dennis is informed by African and diasporic relations to the Earth and the cosmos. Their incisive and excisional ‘para-disciplinary’ practice, which traverses sculpture, film, diagrams and other less readily categorised media (3D printing, algorithm-based text and time itself), summons and strategises with Black and Indigenous African forces to attempt to bring about the end of global modernity – a violent world-order governed by racial capital, expropriation and dispossession.

This year, Dennis’s work has been the subject of three solo exhibitions – UNDERSTUDIES at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, overturns at Swiss Institute in New York and throwers at Gasworks in London. At Swiss Institute, their sprawling wall diagram recurse 4 a late planet (lush) (2024) left an intractable impression on me. In this work, the question of the potentially hazardous Apophis asteroid sits at the centre of an entangled network of astrological data, geological illustrations and mathematical expressions. Textual annotations, drawn from Black cosmopoietic and political thought, recast the data. Illustrations of 99942 Apophis and its shifting orbital proximity to Earth are threaded into a dense schema of drawn and written interventions, including Édouard Glissant’s fibrillose sketch of the transatlantic path of slave ships, probability tree diagrams and abstract line-drawings plotting out fractal recursions.