Concerned with the spiritual futures of technology and seeking to disseminate an awareness of African sciences and technologies, Nolan Oswald Dennis’ practice is concerned with conscious liberation through scientific inquiry. Drawing from African spiritual philosophies, they embrace the interdependency of the organic, spiritual, and technological realms with the hopes of one day restoring energetic imbalances. In this edition we consider their solo exhibition at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art titled UNDERSTUDIES.
This is not an exhibition that promises resolution. Instead, it revels in speculation.
Known to defy typical categorisation, in UNDERSTUDIES, Nolan Oswald Dennis invites their audiences to question what they know and how they came to know it. Taking on the form of a library, laboratory and/ or speculative blueprint of the future, UNDERSTUDIES is liminality manifested.
In most instances, particularly those that are theatrical, understudies refer to people who are trained to take over if the main performer is unable to do so. Working parallel to the performer, the understudy typically learns the role as and when it is being developed.
But this isn’t the case with the Understudies that Dennis puts forward. A nod to speleologists, who study matter found underground, in this context it would not be a stretch to look at Understudies as the layers that came before us, embracing those above, around and beneath.
A bridge between the metaphoric and the literal Xenolith (Letsema) (2024) gives the practice of stratigraphy a body. A collaborative work between Dennis and the museum’s workers, Xenolith takes the form of a free-standing column of tightly packed soil, constructed by the museum’s workers. The term “xenolith” refers to a fragment of one type of rock embedded within another—a metaphor for the disruptions and displacements that underpin our histories.
A branch of geology that deals with the study of rock layers (strata) and their arrangement in the Earth’s crust, stratigraphy involves analysing the sequence, distribution and age of layers in order to understand the Earth’s history, the processes that shaped it and the events it has witnessed.
Toward this, the exhibition statement quotes Dennis as saying, “I’m interested in land as a relationship,” they explain, “a site of connection and disconnection, of belonging and alienation.”
Dennis is deeply aware of the politics of the spaces in which their work is shown. At Zeitz MOCAA, they use the museum not just as a backdrop but as an active participant in the exhibition. This is most evident in Xenolith (Letsema), which foregrounds the labor of museum staff and challenges the traditional hierarchies of authorship.
“I’m interested in the museum as a site of learning,” Dennis explains, “but also as a site of unlearning. Who gets to decide what knowledge is valued? Who gets to decide whose stories are told?”
By involving the museum’s staff in the creation of Xenolith, Dennis invites us to rethink the power dynamics of cultural institutions. The piece becomes a collaborative act, a way of acknowledging the invisible labor that makes exhibitions possible.
At its heart, UNDERSTUDIES is a meditation on liberation. Liberation from the constraints of colonial knowledge. Liberation from the hierarchies of the art world. And liberation from the idea that the world as it is must always be because it hasn’t always been confined to its current profile.
Embracing science, politics, spirituality, and philosophy toward what they refer to as the “material and metaphysical conditions of decolonisation,” UNDERSTUDIES doesn’t present its audience with answers. Reveling in speculation, here Dennis resists the promise of resolution.