Ola Hassanain

Ola Hassanain’s artistic practice moves through architecture, film, performance and installation to reflect on how power becomes visible—and felt—through built environments. 

She engages with places shaped by climate instability, postcolonial legacies, and displacement, and reflects on how spatial technologies—retaining walls, thresholds, irrigation networks—are implicated in broader politics of control and erasure. To Ola, these built forms, designed to manage movement and resources, also manage bodies and histories. 

Watching the debris and the cracks of these systems, cycles and histories becomes a form of responsibility — of bearing witness to both environmental and political catastrophe, and of resistance — of staying with the trouble of what it means to live within unstable ground.

Ola Hassanain – The Watcher (2025)

• Lecture performance Saturday 21 June at 5 pm @ Fobrux

In the lecture performance The Watcher Ola Hassanain highlights how a state of uninhabitability has been propped and maintained as a continuous cycle of catastrophe across Sudan and The Netherlands. A sonic and visual score, embodied by the character of The Watcher in motion, proposes ‘watching’ as a possible space to inhabit, to circumvent the foreclosure on our relationships to material environment, compromised under conditions of ecological erasures and evictions. In English.

The installation in which the performance takes place will remain partially visible in Fobrux.