Artists We Love: Nolan Oswald Dennis

INTERVIEWED BY Malibongwe Tyilo IMAGES courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery

Johannesburg-based artist Nolan Oswald Dennis’s latest exhibition, titled Furthermore, recently finished its run at Cape Town’s Goodman Gallery.

Engaging the re-emergence of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid conversation across society, Dennis looks at specific objects, infrastructures and texts to explore new ways of mapping this critical moment.

We caught up with the artist, whose work goes across “drawings, painting and installation, space, time and memory,” to chat motivation behind his work and what it’s like to be a young working artist in South Africa right now.

What drew you to art?

I was drawn to art-making as an outlet for the things I couldn’t explore in my architectural training. It is the place I can pull all my interests and concerns into and emerge with a meaningful position. Art-making has the potential to hold contradictions.

What are some of the themes that your work focuses on?

An Africa-orientated critical engagement with time and space – social placement, memory and speculation. How to value the way the world looks from this place, and how to see and to share. My work tries to dive deep into the ways we recall our past and construct our future.

You also speak a lot to where we are (going) as a nation. With regards to South Africa, what role do you think art can play in our current socio-political discourse?

I think our always fractured political landscape is finally asserting its complexity and contradictions into South African daily life. Things are burning, but they always were. As a nation we’ve been uncomfortably existing in a half truth, which is now falling apart around us. I guess artists have the duty to go into the complex and dangerous places that some parts of society would rather bury and ignore. Artists have to be brave.

You’ve spoken about your latest exhibition, Furthermore, as a series of proposition for living in a state of “long transition”. Please expand on this.

I think our elders presented their work as done, that they had struggled, liberated this country and negotiated our freedom, that our time was about using our freedom, to live in a new South Africa. But they were being too hopeful or naive or trying to protect us maybe. I think we have to reengineer all the things we inherited (this is the proposition), and we have to live through an act of constant self-creation.

What do you hope to achieve with your work?

I think my work is located in the conversations, research and reflections that inform my view of the state of things in the world. The objects, drawings and artworks that emerge from this process are like memory aides, or analytical tools that help me to work through some of the issues that emerge from this reflection. The artwork is the excess of a thought-work. The work is helpful if it allows for deeper engagement with the world from the specific position of young Africa.

What are you working on at the moment?

I am on a Prohelvetia studio residency in Basel, Switzerland until September and then I start a two-year interdisciplinary masters program at MIT in the US. More generally I am working on collapsing the ‘South’ part of South Africa.

Who are some of your favourite artists?

My NTU family. Tabita Rezaire and Bogosi Sekhukhuni, FAKA, CUSS group, Mbali Khoza and Petite Noir.

Lastly, when you are not busy working, what do you do to wind down?

I try to cycle every day, at least 10km.

View more of Nolan’s work at nolanoswalddennis.withtank.com.