The constellations on a wall can look like a map of eternal facts. Someone first chose their outlines, gave them names and made those names familiar enough to seem natural. Nolan Oswald Dennis’s Black Liberation Zodiac puts another set of figures in that sky. Raised fists, panthers, rifles and farming tools enter its diagrammatic language. The work does not ask visitors to forget the actual stars. It asks them to notice the stories through which the stars have been organised, and whose struggle might become visible if another history guided the drawing.
Dennis is a Johannesburg-based artist born in Lusaka. Their practice moves between diagrams, sculpture, installation, film and other models of space. Goodman Gallery describes their concern as a Black consciousness of space: an inquiry into the hidden systems that set the limits of social and political imagination. The phrase gives a useful way into the work. Dennis takes objects that claim to describe the world, such as globes, charts and maps, and alters their rules. The changed model reveals that a conventional one also came from particular decisions.
Their methods are speculative, but the materials are insistently physical. A globe hangs in a room. An inflatable body swells and contracts through a fan. Earthworms turn pages of an anticolonial book into soil. Wallpaper holds a sky whose symbols come from liberation movements. In an interview with Africa Is a Country, Dennis discusses space, time, Blackness and the limits of Western knowledge. The questions are not placed in a distant science-fiction setting. They emerge from how people on Earth have been taught to measure, divide and inhabit the world.
Dennis has spoken of science fiction as a way to identify structures that a familiar view hides. A long interview reprinted by the Swiss Institute connects their interest to Star Trek, Stargate, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany and the Black Audio Film Collective’s The Last Angel of History. The genre’s value lies in its willingness to ask what system makes the visible world operate, then imagine how that system might be changed. Dennis gives this question a sculptural and diagrammatic form. The visitor enters not a finished utopia, but a model that can be questioned in turn.
A zodiac with another inheritance
Black Liberation Zodiac began in 2017 and has taken more than one form. MIT’s Art, Culture and Technology programme describes an installation using wallpaper as a diagram of symbols from Black liberation movements around the world. The familiar zodiac links human life to celestial figures whose names have travelled through particular traditions. Dennis changes the signs so that a visitor can consider liberation histories as a way of reading the heavens.
The substitution is not a claim that a fist has literally appeared among the stars. It exposes how metaphor and authority have always been part of a constellation’s public life. A diagram selects points, draws relations and teaches people what to remember when they look up. If the selected figures are transformed, the sky becomes a place where different memories can be rehearsed. The work takes a tool of orientation and asks what happens when the people it normally leaves out become part of its guiding system.
In Dennis’s conversation with astrologer Monisha Holmes, published by MIT, the artist names a gun, book, dove, fist, lion and panther among the work’s signs; Holmes notices a hoe beside the gun and book. The variety matters. The image of resistance cannot be reduced to one heroic pose or one weapon. It includes cultivation, defence, solidarity and the labour required after a dramatic moment has passed. A zodiac built from these signs can be read as a cycle rather than a single event. Different forms of action become visible as parts of a larger field.
The diagrammatic format also refuses a simple portrait of one leader. A liberation movement is made by many people and kinds of work, including actions the camera may never have recorded. Dennis’s signs allow the sky to hold a political relation instead of a series of famous faces. A visitor may recognise a symbol immediately, then have to ask who gave it meaning and how it travelled. The image makes knowledge active: reading the wall requires more than naming its shapes.
In a 2025 Observer conversation, Dennis discusses bringing thinkers into imagined relation across censorship and time. That interest illuminates the zodiac. The work lets a visual language from different struggles share one sky without pretending those struggles were identical or their makers ever met. The speculative arrangement gives the viewer a way to think across distance while preserving the fact that each sign came from an actual history.
The project could have ended as a clever reversal of a European star chart. Instead, its ongoing status keeps it open to new relations. A wallpaper version is installed in a site with particular walls and viewers. A new discussion changes how the signs are read. The sky is never the private property of one mythology, and the diagram’s unfinished life makes that point formally. Dennis’s work invites a public to ask what else might belong in a system of orientation.
A globe that breathes with the room
The 2022 sculpture model for a gasp (veiled) gives a different kind of answer to the politics of a model. The Istanbul Biennial’s object record lists a nylon inflatable, integrated fan, cowrie-shell veil, microcontroller and breathing programme. It describes a globular form that inflates and deflates according to the rhythm of people nearby. Their presence becomes part of a feedback system that the object visibly performs.
A conventional globe offers the illusion of a complete world held at a distance. Dennis’s object cannot keep that distance. It moves in response to bodies in the room. The cowrie shells form a textured veil over the inflatable body, while its fan and microcontroller make the motion possible. The viewer encounters a planetlike form that seems to breathe, and a machine whose operation depends on a changing public.
The word gasp holds discomfort as well as life. A gasp can be a moment of surprise, breathlessness or alarm. Dennis does not need to assign only one of those meanings to the swelling form. Its rhythm is produced in relation to people who may be moving, standing close or leaving. The object makes collective presence sensible without turning that presence into a flattering image of harmony. Bodies alter a shared atmosphere, and the shared atmosphere presses back on their attention.
The sculpture’s veil complicates what a model is supposed to reveal. A scientific display often removes a cover so that its mechanism can be inspected. Here, the shell surface belongs to the work’s meaning. The object remains partly hidden while its breathing is visible. Its material layers ask a visitor to think about what an apparently neutral diagram or globe normally conceals: the labour, trade, bodies and decisions through which knowledge is produced.
In the same Istanbul presentation, the biennial showed model for a shadow (articulated), a globe form altered through a recurring mirror image. If one model breathes with people in the room, the other troubles the stability of the world’s outline. A mirrored globe promises repetition, then gives an alternate relation to the object viewers think they know. Neither piece is a substitute for geography. Each makes the habitual conventions of geography available for argument.
Pages becoming ground
In garden for fanon, Dennis gives a book another material future. A4 Arts, which has exhibited the work, describes glass globes containing earthworms that process copies of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth into fertiliser. Dennis also discusses the worms and their care in a first-person interview. The text enters a living process of decomposition. The installation is not a joke about theory being disposable. It asks how thought becomes nourishment, what survives transformation and who is present when an inherited text is made active again.
The vessels make the process visible at a scale that requires attention. A person can look toward the glass and see soil and worms rather than a quotation printed in large letters on a wall. The book’s pages are no longer a stable object that can be placed on a shelf. They enter the ground. The work changes the material relation between reader and text: an argument about decolonisation becomes part of the conditions in which other life can grow.
Fanon’s book has travelled through generations of liberation thought. Dennis’s installation does not offer a final verdict on its legacy. Earthworms are not critics capable of agreeing or disagreeing with its sentences. Their activity makes another point. A text enters history through use, translation, dispute and change. It can be broken down without simply disappearing. The viewer is invited to think of inheritance as a process that demands care rather than preservation under glass alone.
The glass vessel also recalls the laboratory. It allows close observation while separating the living process from the spectator’s hand. Dennis often works with the visual language of scientific systems, then asks who benefits from their claim to objectivity. Here, the living agents are neither human nor mechanical. Their slow work resists an account of political change that recognises only major declarations. Regeneration has its own pace and material cost.
Krull’s essay View From The Kitchen offers a different account of memory living through material practice, in its case food and a shared table. Dennis’s worms, vessels and pages belong to a distinct South African inquiry. The crosslink is useful because both works ask what it means for inheritance to be made and passed on, instead of treated as a static object kept at a distance.
Many worlds on one wall
Dennis’s drawing options has developed since 2019. The Istanbul Biennial describes it as a procedural wall work guided by a proposition that the desired world holds many worlds. The piece diagrams ideas about history, repetition and globalisation rather than illustrating an already agreed future. Each installation can become another iteration, shaped by a site and the relation among its concepts.
The wall is an apt place for such a work. It is both support and boundary. To draw on it is to make thought large enough for visitors to move beside. The biennial describes options as an iterative sketch rather than a final map. A diagram can be redrawn; a relation that seemed fixed can be arranged another way. The physical form gives the artist’s proposition a practice rather than letting it remain an inspiring slogan.
The biennial’s account also identifies Studio Notes drawings in pencil and collage. Notes suggest thinking still in motion, ideas that have not been promoted to a final statement. Dennis brings those pages into the exhibition beside sculptures and the wall diagram. The different scales make a visitor see how a small mark can become a public model, and how a public model may need to return to the uncertainty of a page.
In the Africa Is a Country interview, Dennis discusses models as rehearsals of possible relations rather than simple descriptions of what exists. That distinction is present in options. A viewer does not receive instructions for constructing a perfect future. They encounter a field of choices and connections. The work’s open form demands judgment from those who use it. It also leaves room for someone else to question the artist’s arrangement.
The practice extends into overturns, Dennis’s 2025 Swiss Institute exhibition. In the Observer interview, the artist describes bringing Black liberation thinkers into dialogue across periods when censorship prevented their texts from circulating together in South Africa. The exhibition’s speculative conversation does not invent a historical meeting. It stages a relation that history’s restrictions blocked, then asks what knowledge could become possible if those voices were allowed to address one another.
The instrument and the world
Dennis’s globes and diagrams have a striking visual clarity, but they become more demanding the longer one stays with them. A familiar tool for ordering space may carry colonial assumptions in its centre, borders or names. A planet may be made to look complete while the people in its room are treated as data outside the picture. A zodiac may claim universal guidance while borrowing its characters from one tradition. To alter these tools is to expose the politics already inside them.
The work’s speculative force does not depend on declaring that a new diagram is finally correct. Its force lies in making the map revisable by people whom the old map had made peripheral. Dennis’s first-person account of science fiction, with its hidden structures and communities of knowers, clarifies the method. Knowledge need not be the property of an observer who stands above the world. It can be made with others, tested in a room and changed when it fails to hold their lives.
The cowrie-veiled form breathes; the Fanon pages decompose; the liberation signs reorient a sky; the wall drawing proposes many worlds. These are different works with different rhythms and materials. Together they make the future something more exacting than a beautiful image of elsewhere. It is a question about the instruments people use now, and about who has the power to redraw them.