As part of our collaboration with Kunsthalle Basel for "a recurse 4 [3] worlds" by artist Nolan Oswald Dennis, we teamed up with Carhartt WIP to create a limited edition of the artist’s T-shirts!
Nolan Oswald Dennis' site-specific, monumental diagrammatic artwork spread across the back wall of Kunsthalle Basel. A large-scale diagram is built on the artists’ discussions with physicists, geographers, and writers. Employing mathematical abstractions and African fractal geometry, Dennis charts the systems, logics, and meta-histories of a world dependent on exclusions, which are based on race, gender, class, and geography. This new work borrows from various spiritual practices and knowledges shared across the Sahara to reimagine a different African-European space. As Dennis’s first such artwork in public space, the project is imagined as a tool for disorientation—a technical diagram offering viewers a method for reconsidering concepts of space, time, history, and possibility.
The transfer of a selected part of the large artwork onto the T-shirt would not be possible without the support of Carhartt WIP (Work In Progress), a clothing brand with long-standing relations to arts and artists. An originally American brand which used to produce outfits for workers, Carhartt WIP opened in Europe in 1997 to produce clothing for people who did not find themselves within traditional fashion. Established in 1994 by Edwin Faeh, Carhartt WIP (Work In Progress) develops its own collections based on original Carhartt workwear. The brand takes on authentic adaptations of these robust American archetypes and places itself in a new context bringing forth its own classics. Rebellious and innovative, they launched a radio station for upcoming musicians, published books and magazines, worked with artists across the disciplines.
What connects Carhartt WIP and the work of Nolan Oswald Dennis is the engagement with the notion of public thinking and creating possibilities. As Nolan puts it in the interview with Radio X on his artwork "a recurse 4 [3] worlds," “This idea of thinking in public and thinking together comes from liberation histories, of all kind African Liberation histories, queer liberation practices where knowledge is not about expertise, it is about creating a social possibility.”
The black and white T-shirts created by the artist were made in Tunisia from organic cotton, which is very important for Culturescapes’ support of sustainable economy in the region. Get yours while still in stock at the Kunsthalle Basel bookshop!
Photos: Lukas Zitzer
