LONDON.- Gasworks presents throwers, the first UK solo exhibition by Johannesburg-based artist Nolan Oswald Dennis. The exhibition includes large-scale murals, intricate diagrams, and a 3D-printed installation exploring the intersections of geology, cosmology, and political histories. The works on display examine the conditions that organise our social sub-terrain and the structures that pre-determine the limits of our political imagination.
Featuring new and existing works, the exhibition challenges the colonial conception of a singular, knowable “world”, instead suggesting new models for envisioning a Black planet. One model is a new iteration of recurse 4 a late planet (2024-ongoing), a vast wall mural weaving cosmological, geological, and techno-political knowledge towards a social history of stones. Nolan’s diagram draws from an archive of near-Earth asteroids and their cosmic journeys, with particular attention to the “potentially hazardous objects” that periodically threaten catastrophic damage to our planet. Alongside these celestial perils, Nolan brings together a political history of stones, tracing their trajectories through mythological, spiritual, and activist accounts of justice and social change. Adorning the surface of the mural will be three-dimensional notes including beads, shells, and archival materials touching on references to the world-ending and world-mending properties of stones put into motion through the void. Mindful that a stone flying through the air traces a path through a hierarchy of values, Nolan will for the first time exhibit throwers – a personal archive of images of people throwing rocks.
These materials will be presented alongside Isivivane (2023-ongoing), an installation featuring a 3D-printing machine reproducing rocks selected from specimens held in research archives in London. Tended regularly by Gasworks’ staff, the number of rocks will accumulate throughout the duration of the exhibition, creating a “Black Earth library”. Elsewhere, further notes 4 a planet (2025), a fragmented wall-based diagram, playfully makes lateral connections between different worlds and their speculative modalities. Presented together, these works will tie social, political, and ecological time to the precariousness of existence in any given world.
The exhibition will be contextualised by a new iteration of the Black Earth Study Club, a space for transdisciplinary thinking where collective learning, togetherness, and sociality go hand-in-hand. Convened by interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor, and curator Imani Mason Jordan, the club will invite artists, writers, and scholars to reflect on the topics orbiting Nolan’s practice and offers a relaxed environment in which to reflect on the personal, philosophical, historical, political, scientific, and technological.
