Media release

• The exhibition embraces and maintains a dialogue with the artist’s longstanding para-disciplinary approach

• UNDERSTUDIES forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA that bring into focus and contextualise the practices of artists from Africa and the Diaspora 

• The exhibition opens 8 October 2024 and runs until 25 May 2025

(Cape Town, 19 September 2024): Zeitz MOCAA presents UNDERSTUDIES, the first major South African museum solo exhibition by artist Nolan Oswald Dennis, who lives and works in Johannesburg. The exhibition embraces and maintains a dialogue with the artist’s longstanding para-disciplinary approach. Interested in the fraught history of scientific representation and intervention, the artist encourages us to think of artworks as models, diagrams, hypothetical annotations and simulations rather than sculptures, drawings and installations. The exhibition opens 8 October 2024 on Level 3, Elevator Side of the museum and runs until 25 May 2025.   

Using indexical, analytic and educational devices as tools for rehearsal rather than tools for instruction, the artist suggests that the meaning of these artworks should emerge from the multiple relations between objects in the exhibition and the world outside of it. For Dennis, the exhibition environment often serves as a site for experimentation, producing long cycles of work rather than individualised objects. Featured in the exhibition are artworks that re-perform propositions about geology (land and landlessness) and cosmology (local knowledge and the multiverse) that have come to inform the political arc of the artist’s practice.

Nolan Oswald Dennis was born in 1988 in Lusaka, Zambia. The artist’s practice explores the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonisation, questioning the politics of space and time through a system-specific approach. Their practice recombines social, technical, political and spiritual systems grounded in a planetary condition of landlessness and guided by the overlapping theories and practices of black, indigenous and queer liberation.

Embedded within the logic of Dennis’s artistic practice is an interrogation of systems and fields of knowledge. Dennis redirects geological techniques like stratigraphy to read time and place through layers of the earth, revealing personal and political fictions about our proximity and connection to land.  

UNDERSTUDIES offers a series of propositions to reconceive our own relationship to forms of instruction and authority. Through a set of conceptual devices, the artist’s practice subverts and contends with universalised and exclusionary perceptions of the ‘known’ world. On display in the exhibition is a new configuration of the widely-travelled wall installation titled Black Liberation Zodiac (Molalatladi)(2018 – ?) which features iconography of Black and African liberation archives and its shared histories that, when mapped onto the southern hemisphere night sky, offer a counter system for thinking about global, celestial and universal relations.  

“At Zeitz MOCAA, Dennis unsettles his own artistic authorship by inviting several museum staff to co-produce an artwork. This site-aware ‘recipe work’ titled: Xenolith (Letsema) (2024) – materialises as a free-standing column of tightly packed soil made by some of the many hands that work within and care for the infrastructure of the museum daily. With this gesture, Dennis cites museum workers as fellow collaborators and co-conspirators invested in the social architecture of collective learning in the museum,” says Thato Mogotsi, the curator of UNDERSTUDIES, and Curator of Contemporary Art at Zeitz MOCAA.

UNDERSTUDIES foregrounds the artist’s impulse to work within and against grammars of world-making, questioning where power and knowledge are located.

UNDERSTUDIES forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA that bring into focus and contextualise the practices of artists from Africa and the Diaspora. 

Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by Gucci,
the Mellon Foundation, and BMW South Africa. 

//ends

Please find the media toolkit with full biographies, imagery and image credits, here. To attend the media preview at 3.30 pm for 4 pm on Tuesday, 8 October 2024, or to schedule interviews and receive further information, please contact Evaan Jason Ferreira at evaanjason.ferreira@zeitzmocaa.museum.

Issued by Zeitz MOCAA Communications.

 About Zeitz MOCAA

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) is a public not-for-profit institution that collects, preserves, researches and exhibits contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora; conceives and hosts international exhibitions; develops supporting educational, discursive and enrichment programmes; encourages intercultural understanding; and strives towards access for all. The museum’s galleries feature rotating temporary exhibitions with dedicated space for the permanent collection. The institution also includes the Centre for Art Education (CFAE), and The Atelier, a museum residency programme for artists living and working in Cape Town.

Zeitz MOCAA, situated at the Silo District, South Arm Road, V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa, is open Monday through Sunday, 10 am to 6 pm (last entry at 5.30 pm).
zeitzmocaa.museum   

About Gucci

Founded in Florence, Italy, in 1921, Gucci is one of the world’s leading luxury brands, led by President and CEO Marco Bizzarri and Creative Director Alessandro Michele. Following the House’s centenary, Gucci forges ahead into the next hundred years, continuing to redefine luxury while celebrating the creativity, craftsmanship and innovation at the core of its values.

Gucci is part of the global luxury group, Kering, which manages the development of a series of renowned Houses in fashion, leather goods, jewellery and watches.
gucci.com.

About the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the United States’ largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.
mellon.org.

About the BMW Group

With its four brands BMW, MINI, Rolls-Royce and BMW Motorrad, the BMW Group is the world’s leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles and also provides premium financial and mobility services. The BMW Group production network comprises over 30 production sites worldwide; the company has a global sales network in more than 140 countries.

In 2023, the BMW Group sold over 2.55 million passenger vehicles and more than 209,000 motorcycles worldwide. The profit before tax in the financial year 2023 was € 17.1 billion on revenues amounting to € 155.5 billion. As of 31 December 2023, the BMW Group had a workforce of 154,950 employees.The success of the BMW Group has always been based on long-term thinking and responsible action. The company set the course for the future at an early stage and consistently makes sustainability and efficient resource management central to its strategic direction, from the supply chain through production to the end of the use phase of all products. bmwgroup.com