Ola Hassanain

artist, architect, and researcher

Ola Hassanain works between Amsterdam and Khartoum, focusing on developing spatial literacy through the idea of “space as discourse,” an expanded notion of space that encompasses a scavenging mode of analysis and the re-presentation of space.

In this residency, her artistic research responds to the politics of space—namely, how architecture positions “building” as an ecological “emptying” of territories and as an infrastructure for continuous cycles of “catastrophe,” such as forced migration. In her work she decomposes conventional linear perspectives, vantage points still used today for the representation of built forms, and the induction of future realities, by including practices of space-making rooted in other sensibilities. The line that follows (2023) is an analogous constellation composed of manipulated perspective drawings derived from routes taken in Khartoum, abstracted forms, text, diagrams, and Sufi and Zar practices—all placeholders for an unemptied space.