Exhibitions
Nolan Oswald Dennis: overturns
Wed Jan 22—Sun Apr 20 2025
Drawing Center
35 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10013
Please join us for the launch of Ecliptics, the first-ever monograph by artist Nolan Oswald Dennis, held in collaboration with the Drawing Center.
Inspired by Dennis’s exploration of a “black consciousness of space,” the publication traverses various realms from fiction, linguistics, and metaphysics to astronomy, mathematics, and technology, as well as Black, Indigenous, and anti-imperial intellectual traditions, to consider the planetary conditions for a decolonized future. Offering an introduction to Dennis’s “para-disciplinary” art practice through an elaboration of the political histories, scientific frameworks, and critical theoretical discourses that inform it, the book features newly commissioned texts, a conversation, and reprinted texts by a global constellation of artists and theorists.
On the occasion of the launch, Dennis will be joined in conversation with writer Zoë Hopkins and one of the book’s editors, SI Associate Curator KJ Abudu. Reviving the participatory spirit of the Black Earth Study Club—a series of public programs held during Dennis’s solo exhibition at SI in 2025—the launch will engage the audience in a collective reading and diagramming exercise.
RSVP →
Ecliptics
Edited by KJ Abudu, Alison Coplan and Thato Mogotsi
Text by KJ Abudu, Renée Green, Thato Mogotsi, Zoé Samudzi, Sylvia Wynter, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Calvin Warren, J. Kameron Carter, Panashe Chigumadzi, Santu Mofokeng, Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Karen Barad, Mogobe Ramose, Selby Mvusi, Raafat Majzoub, Masande Ntshanga, Alice Sparkly Kat, la paperson, Quito Swan, and Luciana Parisi and Ezekiel Dixon Román.
Published by Swiss Institute, Zeitz MOCAA, Walther König
Format: Softcover
Dimensions: 8.5 in x 11 in
Pages: 330 pgs / 130 color / 20 b&w
ISBN: 9783753308524
Nolan Oswald Dennis is an artist based in Johannesburg. Dennis holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand (2012) and a Master of Science in art, culture, and technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2018). They are a founding member of the artist group ntu, as well as the Indexing Literacy Program, a collaborative research project collecting new theory for our indexical present, and the convenor of black earth study club, a network for planetary solidarity. Dennis is the 2016 winner of the FNB Arts Prize and the 2023 Videobrasil Jury Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include overturns, Swiss Institute, New York (2025); UNDERSTUDIES, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2024); geo-logics, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2024); and a recurse 4 [3] worlds, Back wall project, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2023). Recent group exhibitions include In Minor Keys, 61st Venice Biennale (2026); Traces of Ecstasy, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, and Lagos Biennial Fourth Edition, Lagos (2024); Cinema Cosmos, 14th Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai (2024); Memory is an Editing Station, Biennial SescVideobrasil, São Paulo (2023); and THIS TOO IS A MAP, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Seoul (2023). Their writing has been published in academic and art publications including The Funambulist, CLARA Architecture/Recherche, Unearthing Traces, and Mater, as well as the inaugural Serpentine Reader. They are currently a research associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg; a member of the Edouard Glissant Art Fund Scientific Committee; coeditor of Indexing Imaginaries, a forthcoming volume of the DATA browser book series published by Open Humanities Press; and editor of the upcoming Cosmic Bulletin published by e-flux.
Zoë Hopkins is a writer and art critic. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she focuses on contemporary experiments in black poetry and poetics. These days, Zoë is particularly interested in questions of poetic and visual negativity, silence, and lack. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, Frieze, ArtReview, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail, in addition to exhibition catalogues from La Biennale di Venezia Arte, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The CUE Art Foundation, Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, and The Henry Art Gallery.
