The garden that eats Frantz Fanon

Ferreirasdorp, in the Joburg inner city, is not for the faint hearted, but approaching Nolan Oswald Dennis’s studio, the chaos peeled away. The security guard offered a subtle smile as he swung the gate open, gesturing towards the central block.

- Thembeka Heidi Sincuba

As I entered the large sunlit space, eyes flickered up from slick screens, which, like the walls, were neatly scattered with works in progress or works that might have been. Dennis led me into a separate studio with even more stillness and even more light, where I had to lean in just to catch his words with my well-worn ears.

Nolan Oswald Dennis began his career as a student of architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand but grew critical of its narrow focus on fixed structures. “I became an artist through working with other people,” he says, finding the art world offered “more space to think and to work in meaningful ways”.

Puncturing the art space were makers such as Rangoato Hlasane of Keleketla! Library and Jamal Nxedlana of CUSS Group.

“There was a sense of urgency,” he says as he recalls Johannesburg's interdisciplinary hive between 2010 and 2016.

Dennis’s trajectory was shaped by his 2012-13 collaboration Social Landscape Project: Transition and Show Us Our Land with Molemo Moiloa at Market Photo Workshop.

In 2015, he co-founded the creative agency NTU with Bogosi Sekhukhuni and Tabita Rezaire and, early on, Dennis began to learn about the art world’s flawed value systems.

He recalls Sekhukhuni’s words, “He said, ‘These people don’t understand how important what I’m doing is.’ And I couldn’t understand at first — he didn’t say ‘good’ or ‘impressive’, he said ‘important.’”

In 2016, Dennis had a solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery, which earned him the FNB Art Prize.

After studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US from 2018 to 2020, he returned to Joburg. By then, his work was internationally renowned, appearing in major biennales, including Berlin, Dakar, Liverpool and Shanghai, plus the Front International Cleveland Triennial in the US.