What

Not

to

Miss

in

Venice’s

Arsenale

and

Giardini

I first encountered Nolan Oswald Dennis’s art at their standout exhibition ‘overturns’ at the Swiss Institute, New York, in 2025. That work, like much of Dennis’s practice, used techniques of poetics, mapping – both geological and cosmological – and abstraction to depict what they call a ‘black consciousness of space’. Black Liberation Zodiac (Kgositsile’s Folly) (2022–ongoing), for instance, redraws the ecliptic plane from the vantage point of a viewer in the southern hemisphere, substituting Eurasian constellation symbols with iconography drawn from Black liberation and anti-capitalist struggles.