Bubblegum Club

Tag: Nolan Oswald Dennis

  • Tell Freedom. 15 South African artists

    Kunsthal KAdE in the Netherlands will host a new exhibition titled Tell Freedom. 15 South African artists. The 15 artists featured engage with South Africa’s history of racial violence, racial capitalism, inequalities and injustice. However, there is a sense of hope for the future that comes across in their work; a realistic hope that comes from being deeply embedded in a layered South African socio-political context. Their work interrogates differing levels of social, political and economic injustices rooted in the colonial era and the period of apartheid. Through this contextualized engagement with differing levels grown from South Africa’s history, they attempt to understand their own position in the fluid and solidified aspects of the country’s social fabric. This also allows the artists to create an imaginary of South Africa’s future which is expressed through visual vernaculars.

    ‘Verraaier – Devil’s Peak’ 2017 by Francois Knoetze

    Fine artist, culture consultant and curator Nkule Mabaso as well as art historian, writer and critic Manon Braat are the curators for this exhibition. The exhibition’s curatorial foundation is based on a specific question: is it possible to envisage a future based on principles of humanity and equality, rather than on exclusion and division? The objective for this exhibition and associated event is to contribute towards conversations and theoretical engagements on inequality to achieve a more inclusive society in South Africa and the Netherlands.

    ‘The Pied Piper’ 2013 by Lebohang Kganye

    The artists included in the exhibition are Bronwyn Katz, Neo Matloga, Donna Kukama, Haroon Gunn-Salie, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Lerato Shadi, Madeyoulook, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Lebohang Kganye, Ashley Walters, Francois Knoetze, Mawande Ka Zenzile, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Dineo Seshee Bopape and Sabelo Mlangeni.

    The exhibition will be from 27 January – 6 May 2018.

    ‘Batsho bancama’ 2017 by Buhlebezwe Siwani
    ‘Orkaan Kwaatjie’ 2017 by Bronwyn Katz
    ‘The messengers or The knife eats at home’ 2016 by Kemang Wa Lehulere

  • NTU: UBULAWU // Collaborative Transcontinental Healing Practices in East London’s Auto Italia

    Mounds of earth erupt from a soft slate coloured screed floor. Soil cocoons containing rectangular white boxes pepper the project space. Informative posters hang vertically off the walls, divulging details about Ubulawu – a collection of plants traditionally used in South African spiritual practice. The exhibition explores an Afrocentric approach to decolonial healing through ancient systems, disseminated through the digital. A combination of sculptural pieces, video installation and symbolic imagery prompt potential prophetic dreamscapes. Channels for interdimensional communication are activated throughout the art-space.

    NTU is a collective of artists including Nolan Oswald Dennis, Tabita Rezaire and Bogosi Sekhukhuni. Their first debut in London is rooted in a larger research project, NTUSAVE which draws on their collective interests and art practices. Nolan describes the project as, “a deep meditation on the psycho-spiritual interspecies alliance between human consciousness and plant intelligence. This project draws on ancient African knowledge and protocols around the use of specific agencies of plant-life to recover technologies that grant access to interdimensional flows of consciousness and information. NTUSAVE is currently working with ubulawu oneirogenic preparations of Southern African plants to recode properties of water as an agent of consciousness.”

    In conversation with Marianne Forrest, one of the artists who runs the project alongside Kate Cooper and Edward Gillman,  positioned the space as a platform to, “make NTU’s ongoing research public, which has been an exciting provocation, and to bring their practice as a group to the UK for the first time where it feels particularly interesting to have their voice, seeking new dialogues and presenting new modes of research not usually seen or discussed within the London art scene.”

    Collectivity and an expansive approach to artistic production and the mode in which it occupies spaces is a common interest. “We were particularly interested in how the group was exploring ideas around networks of production and alternative conceptions of interfaces – thinking through practices for creating connection and community and exploring ideas of healing potential and spirituality online and in digital production.”

    Auto Italia (Marleen Boschen, Theo Cook, Kate Cooper, Marianne Forrest, Andrew Kerton, Jess Wiesner), MY SKIN WAS AT WAR WITH A WORLD OF DATA, performance as part of ‘sunrise sunset’, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2016. Photograph: Frank Sperling

    Auto Italia was founded on principles of collaboration. The project space began a decade ago when “a group of recent art graduates came together to try and create an autonomous space to make, produce and show work. No one could afford a studio and there was a desire to see what could be made working collaboratively and self-organising – creating a space in the city that was for us, and striving towards a generative and generous model that would allow us to dream up projects with other artists that we really admired.”

    Marianne expanded in the rich history of the project, “from the beginning, there was a desire to understand what it meant to have space; the first ever building we were occupying was a squatted car garage in South London, and from then until around 2014 we operated fairly nomadically… We were constantly thinking through what having physical space might mean, especially with the concurrent shift towards making, producing and sharing work digitally, and the increasingly inhospitable landscape of London as a city artists could actually afford to be in.”

    Auto Italia (Marleen Boschen, Theo Cook, Kate Cooper, Marianne Forrest), On Coping, 2015.

    Over the last ten years a network of new communities have been established through engaging with notions of “labour, gender, performativity and formats for collective production.” A continuous presence has been maintained in the city. “We often think about Auto Italia as something useful that can enable the artists working within it to access tools, whether that be budgets, different production modes, new networks and so on – and with the work of SA collectives like NTU and CUSS we see that same approach of exploding expectations in what art can be and enact, and using the power of collaborative working to create a scene of producers who support and champion each other in defining their own terms of production.”

    Decoloniality is life after death, NTU doesn’t die, we multiply.

    – Nolan Oswald Dennis

    Auto Italia, Auto Italia LIVE: Double Dip Concession, 2012, live broadcast from the ICA, London, as part of the exhibition ‘Remote Control’. Photograph: Ryan McNamara

  • The subversive love of Nolan Oswald Dennis’ Furthermore

    Nolan Oswald Dennis’ current exhibition, titled Furthermore, at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town resists (neo)colonial logics of closure and destabilises the necrological dimensions of neo-imperial violence that continue to suffocate the vitality of life within the “always collapsing social fiction” of a ‘new’ South Africa.  Instead of circumscribing what constitutes ‘reality’ through the exclusions of reductive tendencies, Furthermore seeks to open up a wide field of engagement where points of tension are explored through an acknowledgement of multiple epistemologies and perspectives.

    The title of the show is an indication of these complexities in its significance as both a stereotypical trope of political jargon and as a word that continually expands the centre to bring into orbit the significance of that which is constructed as peripheral.  What does it mean to notice the complexity of gestures involved in the recent removal of the statue of Rhodes, where it wasn’t simply unceremoniously toppled in a realisation of necessary decolonial vengeance but was carefully hoisted by the arm of a crane, holding preservation together with removal? What could these movements signify if seen in relation to the archaeological violence of the removal of other statues over a hundred years ago, which facilitated the incorporation and appropriation of  the Zimbabwean Birds into Rhodes’ personal mythology, and moved toward stasis where the best ‘specimen’ remains in The Groote Schuur Manor House, the current home of South Africa’s president? How do bodies contain the traces of technologies of violence enacted in the bizarre melting-down of artefacts through the Ancient Ruins Company?

    Another Country I to VI_1

     

    Another Country I to VI (image courtesy of Goodman Gallery)

     

    Furthermore points to ways in which both the presence and the absence of memory can indicate how it is institutionalised or ideologically incorporated into (and appropriated for) nationalist conceptions and (neo)colonial forms of domination which seek to invalidate alternative imaginings and thus, the creation of alternative forms of life. The implications of memory are expanded through considerations of complicacy which circumvent particular ascriptions of identity and subjectivity and breathe against unequivocal integration into hegemonic forms of political sovereignty. In all of these foldings, Furthermore illuminates the ways in which acts always contains their own dissidence and seems to suggest that it is this difficulty that can actually enable engagement and understanding.

    Dennis’ work carries the feeling of a contemporary articulation of Aimé Césaire’s resignation letter to Maurice Thorez, where Césaire stated that; “I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism… But neither do I want to lose myself in an emaciated universalism… My conception of the universal is… enriched by all that is particular” and that “it is life itself that decides.” In a vital embrace of becoming, Furthermore exhibits a transformative form of politics concerned with altering ontology, with irrupting integration into the bankruptcy of artificially discrete ideas.

    The work of Dennis exploits inherent tensions in order to turn a system back on itself. The scent of this is carried in the way that Furthermore manipulates the aesthetic markers of the official and mimics the austere and processional tone of that which is sanctioned. The box is a central concern in the way that is can simultaneously obfuscate and draw attention-to. What constitutes a blanket-statement and how does this relate to a texture touching skin? History is captured in the impermanence of wax. There is a kind of urgent short-circuiting of algorithmic meaning played out in the patient intricacy of networks of lines. The aggressive pontification of the linearity of time is suspended through the co-presence of rocks and screens, unattributed texts from indiscernibly ‘different’ times which resonate together. There is a sense of the way in which graves are sometimes marked by deliberately damaged pots; of how new meanings can emerge and circulate.

    Dark Places I & II_1

    Dark Places I & II (image courtesy of Goodman Gallery)

     

    When I spoke to Dennis about Furthermore, he spoke about the symbolism involved in how gallery spaces attempt to present neutrality through a deliberate lack of self-memory, an active evisceration of all signs of what has come before; how the ‘art world’ is a huge industrial machine for moving money across borders and the ways in which everything else just functions to validate this; how an awareness of these limitations saw a manoeuvring of  format for growth and explorations which can then perhaps enable other kinds of engagement; how the work can never be about the completed objects which are really just the excess of the work of trying to understand; how even intimate autobiographical aspects get captured and claimed, constantly repeated under the reductive  and paradoxically distancing guise of ‘engagement’. All of these threads that weave together, all of the attendant things; the continuities in spite of the projected fragmentations.

    Furthermore demands a new language and speaks to ways in which South Africans are no longer satisfied with the placating illusions of freedom, suspended in a series of active irresolutions. It reflects a radical praxis and offers an example of how some of the most thorough decolonial work is happening beyond the codified landscapes of engagement. Furthermore is part of a subversive love that will see South Africa invented anew and that risks singing madly with Sankara that we must dare to invent the future,

    Furthermore…