NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS

Dennis suggests thinking of artwork as prepositions rather than propositions. 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)’.

Options in turn works through our present political moment in which 20^th 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’.