Ola Hassanain
Ola Hassanain is an artist whose work moves through architecture, film and spatial strategies to reflect on how power becomes visible—and felt—through built environments. Her practice engages with places shaped by climate instability, postcolonial legacies, and displacement, thinking through the politics of inhabiting and how ecological and social systems shape one another across time. She often takes on the role of ‘watching’ in her work as a proposition for existing in the world when inhabiting space becomes impossible. In the course of this work, she thinks through material, poetics and metaphor.
“Script #3 Arrivals presents a sketch of a film and an installation that explore gestures and rituals of receiving what arrives: materially, socially and metaphorically. With this work I reflect on arrivals in multiple forms: spatial, economic, inherited and creative, in relation to the completion of Sudanese water-control architectures such as the Sennar Dam and the Gezira Scheme. I focus on bodily movements and celebrations that marked these moments of arrival as embodied in the figure of the Human Grasshopper. I resist the positioning of Sudanese bodies as passive within British colonial narratives of extraction, toxicity, and ecological erasure—histories that continue to shape present realities. By placing a grasshopper, the installation becomes a space that traces the migration and transformation of ideas of water control across geography and time, creating a point of arrival in its own right.”