Nolan Oswald Dennis: Ecliptics

From cosmological diagrams and scientific models to formal poetics and social critique, Dennis’s practice visualizes liberation on a planetary scale

This first monograph on Lusaka-born, Johannesburg-based Nolan Oswald Dennis (born 1988) is inspired by their exploration of a “black consciousness of space,” traversing 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.

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, Luciana Parisi and Ezekiel Dixon Román.