Nolan Oswald Dennis Explores the Limits of Information

“Understudies,” a survey of labor by Zambian-born, Johannesburg-based artist Nolan Oswald Dennis on the Zeitz Museum of Up to date Artwork Africa, opens with an overture—or so I assumed. I entered by way of a studying room containing an imposing vertical metal construction, a wall drawing rendered in graphite, and the artist’s studio notes: analysis drawings that will turn into their new physique of labor. The room was an instance of what Dennis described within the exhibition textual content as “quietly sharing secret methods of liberation by way of convoluted and non-linear types.”

I later discovered that this room was really the tip of the exhibition: I had seen the present in reverse. This false starting however set the tone for me and felt becoming for an exhibition set on difficult and reimagining information and constructions that really feel fastened, whether or not astronomy, land sovereignty, geological formations, or cartographic methods.

Dennis relinquishes some authorship (learn: energy) within the making of some works in “Understudies,” calling on museum employees on the Zeitz MOCAA to cocreate. The work Xenolith (Letsema), 2024, a big column made out of strains of packed soil, is put in alongside the uncovered hundred-year-old columns of the grain silo the place the museum is constructed. Letsema, a Setswana phrase, speaks to the observe of voluntarily working collectively—a communal act sometimes utilized to farming however prolonged to methods of organizing that took root throughout liberation struggles in Southern African nations. This collaborative work considers what pictures can emerge when labor is finished collectively, and turns into a method to disorganize area and time—area, by reimagining the very construction of the museum, and time: the time of labor, and of geological deep time.

House, time, and the mystifying but unusual methods they work together are recurring themes for Dennis, whose concurrent present, “overturns,” is on view on the Swiss Institute in New York by way of April. Essentially the most affecting work in “Understudies” is titled Superposition, 2024, after a precept of quantum mechanics: It describes how a bodily system could be in multiple state on the similar time. This immersive sonic room-size set up, boasting an infrasonic sound system consisting of a sub-bass speaker, LED unit, and sensors, is a techno-poetic reflection on our relationship to land, deep time, and planetary interconnection. The work makes use of acoustic compositions of seismic information documenting the earth’s vibrations collected by the Wits Faculty of Geosciences in Johannesburg throughout the 2020 COVID lockdown. These sounds seize information about volcanoes, bombs, and earthquakes, however are performed at frequencies past the edge perceptible by the human ear. Superposition explores how we would study to hearken to the earth, attuning ourselves to the vibrations that move by way of it; it additionally factors to the boundaries of what we will know and understand, and to the boundaries of information’s authority.

Certainly, the present typically speaks corporeally as a lot because it does cognitively. All through the present, Fred Moten and Wu Tsang’s idea of gravitational really feel rang loud in my thoughts. I stored pondering—nay, sensing—a form of gravitational pull towards area and time, my physique feeling its personal mass, conscious of its weight and the burden of time. Although maps, machines, information, and drawings fill the museum, they’re organized in installations that choreograph our bodies. As an example, Izintaba (Hottentots-Holland), 2024, is a 12-minute immersive movie that includes digital simulations of mountains, hills, and different elevations. Viewing the movie, one is enveloped by it; the rocks appear to drift towards you.

In Biko.Fanon (2018), receipt printers hooked up to a wall emit an imagined dialog between two radical Black thinkers, Steve Bantu Biko and Frantz Fanon, across the notion of affection; Dennis used an algorithm to re-create a dialogue primarily based on their particular writings. This straightforward but highly effective gesture speaks to how we would think about radical Black liberation—as being essentially based on the power to carry one another, the place holding implies a love ethic within the method described by bell hooks: a form of radical love encompassing care, devotion, ardour, longing, and tenderness, in addition to robust love rooted in accountability and motion. One other work within the collection imagines an change between Biko and Nomzamo Winnie Mandela. These speculative conversations are gestures towards centering radical love inside the context of decoloniality, and towards imagining the chances of political solidarity grounded in care.

Care as resistance recurs in works just like the pliable sculpture Mushy Rock (leNqaba yo Mkhosi), customized seating that includes {a photograph} of a rock discovered by Dennis’s interlocutor, the artist Vusumzi Nkomo. The yielding texture of the seating contrasts with the unyielding nature of the particular rock—an emblem of dispossession and resistance—what Dennis refers to as a “gesture for many who keep in mind what the stone can do.” The stone, used as a weapon by thousands and thousands of Black South Africans in opposition to authority and bullets, additionally poetically symbolizes the energy of numerous girls whose struggles stay unheard, referencing the isiZulu idiom: Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo (You strike a lady, you strike a rock.) This work speaks to the persistent tensions between pliability and rigidity relating to acts of resistance and care.

“Understudies” foregrounds Dennis’s impulse to work in opposition to the prevailing logic of data manufacturing and worldmaking. I can’t assist however consider Dennis’s work by way of the lens of world-ending praxis, as propositions for ending this world and creating new ones knowledgeable by Audre Lorde’s mantra that “the grasp’s instruments can not dismantle the grasp’s home.” The work doesn’t present clear solutions to the issue of what to do when methods of data are polluted by entanglements with energy, but it surely does supply methods of experimenting with liberation.

A query that lingers in my thoughts is whether or not Dennis, in crafting elegant works so deeply rooted in his personal conceptual language, dangers veering into ultra-abstraction. Do the sleek strains, undulations, and symmetries present in many of the works danger diluting the burden of these injustices embedded within the methods they critique, rendering them palatable and indifferent? Or is it that, as their work desires of liberation and envisions completely different, higher worlds, the query turns into whether or not such visions supply real avenues for escape—or whether or not they, and artwork itself, danger being merely escapist.