In Conversation: Nolan Oswald Dennis, Zoë Hopkins and KJ Abudu on Ecliptics

Join us to celebrate the launch of Ecliptics, the first-ever monograph by artist Nolan Oswald Dennis.

Nolan Oswald Dennis will be joined in conversation with writer Zoë Hopkins and one of the book’s editors, Swiss Institute's Associate Curator KJ Abudu. Reviving the participatory spirit of the Black Earth Study Club—a series of public programs held during Dennis’s solo exhibition at SI in 2025—this event will engage the audience in a collective reading and diagramming exercise.

Inspired by Dennis’s exploration of a “black consciousness of space,” Ecliptics traverses various realms from fiction, linguistics, and metaphysics to astronomy, mathematics, and technology, as well as Black, Indigenous, and anti-imperial intellectual traditions, to consider the planetary conditions for a decolonized future. Offering an introduction to Dennis’s “para-disciplinary” art practice through an elaboration of the political histories, scientific frameworks, and critical theoretical discourses that inform it, the book features newly commissioned texts, a conversation, and reprinted texts by a global constellation of artists and theorists.