Nolan Oswald Dennis' solo exhibition 'Options' opens

Artist Nolan Oswald Dennis’s second solo exhibition, Options, opens at the Goodman Gallery in Woodstock today. Photo: Facebook

Artist Nolan Oswald Dennis’s second solo exhibition, Options, opens at the Goodman Gallery in Woodstock today. Photo: Facebook

Published Jan 24, 2019

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Cape Town – Artist Nolan Oswald Dennis’s second solo exhibition, Options, opening at the Goodman Gallery in Woodstock today, consists of a series of drawings, diagrams and systems that consider the present moment in which 20th-century social fictions have emerged.

In his exhibition, Dennis grapples with that idea in relation to the hidden structures that predetermine the limits of our social and political imagination, exploring the hidden landscape of the systematic and structural conditions that organise our political sub-terrain.

Options presents work synonymous with its title and runs until March 9.

The gallery stated: “Prepositions are defined as a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations."

Combining this definition with the "option theory of decolonisation" - summed up by the statement "the world we want is a world in which many worlds exist" - Dennis envisions his work "not as a catalyst for the future, or reflection on the past, but as a shadow or diagram of the longness of now (or as the late Keorapetse Kgosistile describes it, the pastpresentfuture)".

The gallery added: “Options in turn works through our present political moment in which 20th-century social fictions have re-emerged.

"Dennis considers this idea in relation to the linguistic and visual limits of (post)colonial language, attempting to map the terrain of local and global power relations through work that subverts our idea of linear time and space.

“For Dennis, this approach is an intrinsic part ‘of thinking, being in, making, fixing, breaking, changing, or ending the world’. Central to Options then is a vision of a transformed world that exists, in the artist's words, ‘somewhere beside the dream.’”

The exhibition opens at 6pm and can be viewed from Tuesdays to Fridays between 9.30am and 5.30pm and on Saturdays from 9.30am to 4pm. 

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