Nolan Oswald Dennis

black liberation zodiac (Kgositsile’s Folly), 2022

'Rememberer (Kgositsile’s Folly)' is an annotated wallpaper from ‘a black liberation zodiac’ series. This excerpt, presented as an infinity curve, is dedicated to the South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile and his temporal conception of a black past-present future.

Keorapetse Kgositsile’s poetry and his exile in the USA weaves important connections between the African American anti-racist struggle and the anti-apartheid struggle (e.g. The Last Poets - an important New York based political poetry collective who named themselves after Kgositsile’s work). In this artwork the anti-slavery and radical iconography of Afro-American resistance is put in dialogue with anti-colonial symbolic language from the African continent. This work takes the conceptual form of a Folly, a landscape architectural genre of minor ruins. In this work, a Folly becomes a rehearsal for a still missing monument.