cosmogrammars

Online and Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm

Participants

Nolan Oswald Dennis

holotype model (double), 2026, photo: Anthea Pokroy, courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery.

South African para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis presents cosmogrammars. Unfolding as a three part programme, cosmogrammars explores what happens at the limits of technical-ritual knowledge, generative practices and alter-systems-of-knowledge for worldlessness.

Nolan states:

‘Following my current research on earth-sky conjunctions and apparatuses of enactment (WT “the sky is also a kind of land”). Attendees are invited to enact a “black earth study club” in which we reflect on and produce makeshift models, diagrams and apparatuses for “study” as a mode of relative re-positioning. Here relative repositioning refers to the more-or-less opaque social and environmental relations through which our knowledges and technologies maintain or erase difference. In this iteration a cosmogrammar is a set of generative practices, rules, assumptions, steps, heuristics, principles, logics, etc. for constituting a whole, its doubles and the fractional relations within and without it. A cosmogrammar is the black hole radiation at the horizon of disclosure, the last stop before no relation is possible’.

Part 1 will be held online on Thursday 17th September 2026 between 16:00-18:00.
Part 2 will be held online on Wednesday 4th November 2026 between 16:00-18:00.
Part 3 will be held in person on the 5th March 2027 in Stockholm at Bonniers Konsthall. More details to follow.

For part 1 and part 2 please join via this zoom link: https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/63955889665

This invitation to Nolan to contribute to the LAB focus area Technological Wisdom is a collaboration between PARSE and Reconstructions. Reconstructions seeks to reimagine spatial practices “otherwise”–– learning from black feminism. Guided by the question “ What kind of reparative world-building practice could emerge centering affective labor and tending that is required to reimagine future practices”. Transdisciplinary, process-based and practice-led, it is an experimental platform and art project operating as postmaster course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm led by Marie-Louise Richards, Senior Lecturer in Architecture, bringing together an intimate group of practitioners and researchers to be in dialogue and engagement with each other alongside invited guests.

Contributor

Nolan Oswald Dennis

Nolan Oswald Dennis is an artist based in Johannesburg. Their practice explores the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization, questioning histories of space and time through system-specific interventions. They hold a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and a master’s degree in art, culture, and technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Swiss Institute, New York; and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. They have been featured in group exhibitions at FRONT Triennial, Cleveland; the Lagos Biennial; the Liverpool Biennial; MACBA, Barcelona; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Seoul Mediacity Biennale; the Shanghai Biennale; and the Young Congo Biennale, among others. They are a member of artist groups NTU and Index Literacy Program, a research associate with the VIAD Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg, and a member of the Édouard Glissant Art Fund Scientific Committee. They were invited by Koyo Kouoh to participate in the 61st Venice Biennale.