NEW YORK, NY.- Swiss Institute presents overturns, the first institutional solo exhibition in the US by Nolan Oswald Dennis. Dennis traverses the subterrains of what they call a “black consciousness of space,” a multivalent conceptual framework for exploring the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization. Employing a systems-oriented approach, Dennis interrogates the discourses and practices of Black, queer, and Indigenous liberation.

overturns departs from a pair of conceptual threads in the work of Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter. Lending the exhibition its title, Dennis references Wynter’s call to develop a “new science” that combines the humanities and the natural sciences in order to overturn prevailing Western epistemes. Dennis couples this ethic of disciplinary transgression with a reworking of Wynter’s theory of the “genres” of the human, which argues that the social, economic, and ecological inequities that pervade the global present are the result of the ongoing systemic “overrepresentation” of “Man,” a dominant Western bourgeois genre of being human. For overturns, Dennis advances their notion of the “genres of the planet” to consider modernity’s figuration of the Earth as unified, transparent, and amenable to the proprietary drives of racial capital.

overturns is accompanied by the Black Earth Study Club, a series of transdisciplinary public programs occurring over four chapters that will reflect on Black metaphysics, anti-colonial pedagogy, digital futures, and land dispossession. Bringing together artists and scholars predominantly from the African continent and its global diasporas, these events aim to create a temporary space of conviviality, sociality, and collective learning.

On the occasion of the exhibition, SI together with Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town and Koenig will publish the first ever monograph on Dennis’s practice in April 2025. The publication will feature newly commissioned contributions by KJ Abudu, Renée Green, Thato Mogotsi, and Zoé Samudzi, and reprinted texts by a global constellation of artists and theorists whose work inform Dennis’s research.

This exhibition is organized by KJ Abudu, Assistant Curator, Public Programs and Residencies. Special thanks to Alison Coplan, Chief Curator.

Nolan Oswald Dennis: overturns is made possible through support from A4 Arts Foundation. SI gratefully acknowledges the Ubuntu circle and additionally wishes to thank Goodman Gallery for production support. The exhibition is presented in partnership with Gasworks, London.

Deborah-Joyce Holman: Close-Up

Swiss Institute is pleased to present Close-Up, the first institutional exhibition in the US by Deborah-Joyce Holman. Holman contends with the politics of representation of racialized and gendered subjects, interrogating the relationships between contemporary visual regimes and the material and ideological circulations of capital. Close-Up attends to and articulates sites of refusal with a single-channel film that features a contemplative Black actress in a modernist domestic setting, quietly engaged in mundane tasks.

Presented in SI’s lower-level gallery, Close-Up minutely restages a scene in a previous multichannel video work by the artist, Close-Up/Quiet As It’s Kept (2023). In each of these works, the viewer is presented with a despectacularized, non-narrative sequence that features the same actress in the same place. The camera trails behind as the figure enacts a series of quotidian movements – from drinking tea to lying on a couch – and pans across the home, focusing on its architectural details and various furnishings.

In Close-Up, Holman proposes a conceptual correspondence between the serial repetition of the film work and the ongoingly reproduced forms of structural and symbolic violence imposed on racialized and gendered subjects. If the aesthetic regimes of cinematic technology and the expropriated labors of these invisibilized subjects are bound up with one another, Close-Up looks beyond political grammars of repair to consider the quiet, disruptive frequencies of Black feminine agency within the filmic field of representation.

This exhibition is organized by Alison Coplan, Chief Curator, and KJ Abudu, Assistant Curator, Public Programs and Residencies.