What does a “black consciousness of the space” look like? Is it a positive or a negative, or Elide the two? And what about the tension or contrast between a “racial, characteristic world and heterogeneous black and native imagination”? These are some of the questions that you will struggle with in the first American exhibition of Lusaka born and the artist Nolan Oswald Dennis, established in Johannesburg, who has a talent to articulate their ideas in powerful objects that both their inner logic and contradictions Hide and reveal and reveal. .
In “Articulated Globe (Pair)” (2024), which can most clearly express the vision of the exhibition, two bulbs touch in a way that indicates comrade or care. One, a conventional globe that is turned upside down, leans in the other, a black version covered with a Cowry Shell auction, in what we could imagine is a accession of worlds. That in between is what the artist fascinates, who explores pre- and post-colonial worlds in a framework that does not suggest the teleology of one that becomes the other, but rather a worldview of the two as simultaneously and interlocking.
Despite some of the philosophical influences in their work, which otherwise suggest-head among them Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter, who guides our focus to the natural world to counteract what she calls the “overrepresentation of man” objects still Always fundamental Dennis’ practice. These objects poke, sometimes ask the viewer to imagine non-existent versions such as their reverse or new iterations, and sometimes incomplete, such as “Isivivane” (2023-alloing), in which a 3D printer of all over the world rearranges, Including Australia, Palestine and South Africa. In the context of the museum or art space, this reproduction of parts or relics touches on refunds and suggests that we are often stuck on the surface, instead of investigating what is below.
In “Further notes 4 a planet (nine-dash)” (2024), necklaces of letter beads connect panels of words such as a switchboard that channel us to another concept of reality. It seemed that the work could be interactive, so I asked the supervisor if I could touch it. They said no, because the chains are apparently too delicate for the public to handle. That invitation to come up with again – and the ability to keep in – is an appropriate way to see how art can promise the unreachable, creating spaces that have never existed, while we demand that we follow certain rules to access to get.
One of the many sentences that appear on a screen in “approaches (1)” (2021) is “Discovery is code word for forgetting”; Another is the title of this review. Rituals of learning and unlearning drive us to move forward and change, to change what we know for asking what we don’t do, and wait for the answer, if it ever comes.
Nolan Oswald Dennis: overthrow Continue at the Swiss Institute (38 St. Mark’s Place, East Village, Manhattan) until 13 April. The exhibition was compiled by KJ Abudu.
