Ola Hassanain

The Line that Follows is filmed in Khartoum, Sudan. As the title suggests, the film follows multiple traces. Traces of theoretical texts, artistic imagination and material sources. On the one hand the work attempts to visualize mental processes of analytical thinking and research. On the other hand it contextualizes the thinking body within a specific habitat of knowledge and psychogeography, in this case Khartoum. In this manner the work directly reveals how thinking can “inhabit” individual bodies as well as their immediate and more distant environments. The work interrogates various ideas of what it means to reside in a space. Furthermore it introduces a spiritual dimension of space, drawn from the artist’s Sufi lineage.
Ola Hassanain’s artistic practice is strongly informed by her background in architecture. Her practice explores how architecture positions building as an ecological “emptying” of territories, and an infrastructure for continuous cycles of catastrophe, such as forced migration. Her most recent work explores the idea of “space as discourse,” an expanded no-tion of space that encompasses political and environmental questions.

Ola Hassanain is an artist and architect based in Amsterdam. Ola’s development of critical spatial practice is informed by her post-academic training; a current teaching role at KABK in the Hague, a Rijksakademie residency, a BAK fellowship and teaching and co-development of the Blackerblackness Master course at Sandberg Instituut. Her work has been exhibited, amongst others, at Buro Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam and Ghana Contemporary Art Foundation, Accra.