Nolan Oswald Dennis has been awarded the 2016 FNB Art Prize. Dennis joins a prestigious list of winners since the launch of the FNB Art Prize in 2011, and will be showcasing his work in a dedicated space at the FNB Joburg Art Fair. The works on exhibition further his interest in the ever-fluctuating conditions of place and time. The ostensible certainty of chronology and territory is negated in meticulous line drawings, inscribed wax sculptures and printed textiles of a re-imagined South African Flag.
The idea of becoming forms a major theme in the works, which attest to the ongoing transitional state of South Africa’s fledgling democracy. In speaking about the works, the artists states ‘this is a re-examination of the political technologies of memory and forgetting that are mobilized in the becoming of (South) Africa.’ Becoming, then, is a future state and Dennis’ work involves the process of determining his own place in the always collapsing social fiction of the late rainbow nation.
