About the Artist

Abstract

The cover art for this issue is drawn from the 2021 Johannesburg exhibition conditions by Zambian/South African artist Nolan Oswald Dennis. Like much of Dennis's interdisciplinary practice, both of the featured pieces employ the model as a key form and method for reimagining the world. Together, model for theia and model for an endless column (suspended) are training objects for what the artist calls “a black consciousness of space,” which is to say the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization itself.Although Dennis's work ranges from diagrammatic drawings to digital essay games, it is unified by his enduring interest in the politics of space and time as seen from Africa, and specifically by the never-ending task of “making space by saying things differently, making time by seeing things otherwise” (Dennis n.d.). The model serves this project because of its special relationship to knowledge. Models are often overlooked in favor of what they represent, as if they have no qualities or properties of their own. However, being at once itself and something else, an artifact and a hypothesis (Dennis 2018), the model materializes the entanglement of matter and meaning, expressing the simultaneity of what is and how it is understood. Just as importantly, models hold open the gap between known, unknown, and not known yet where so much is still possible. Hence, training objects: the preparation for a use that may be unimaginable now.In conditions, Dennis revisits the globe as an idealized figure in Western cosmology that masquerades as a neutral description. He exposes that figure as a historically specific process of colonial world-making for which competing narratives and counter-diagrams can/do/must exist. If the goal of the globe is to present the planet as a seamless, enclosed, and knowable unity, Dennis's interventions carve out the space for it to become something else, without insisting in advance on what that something else might be. By transforming the planet's surface and altering its shape through distortion and multiplication, the artist thus enacts a deep commitment to what Walter Mignolo describes as decolonial options, or coexisting universes of meaning, over any single universal truth.This is a vision of a world in which, as the Zapatistas put it, many worlds might fit (Dennis 2018).Nolan Oswald Dennis was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. He holds a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand and a master of science in art, culture, and technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With Tabita Rezaire and Bogosi Sekhukhuni, he is a founding member of the decolonial healing agency NTU, dedicated to exploring the spiritual futures of technology from the vantage point of African knowledge systems. Dennis is currently artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation in London.