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Fellowship

Fellow 2017/2018

Ola Hassanain

Ola Hassanain is an artist with degrees in architecture, cultural identity, and globalization. She has an MFA with distinction from HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht. Her artwork is informed by the cultural, political, and societal position of women in Khartoum, including her own experiences and her family’s diaspora. Her project Back and Forth (2016–ongoing) deals with the link between women, public space, and policies in Khartoum. Her involvement in the Dutch art scene has been critical for developing her work on culture-specific gender and spatial politics. Hassanain lives and works in Khartoum and Utrecht.

Ola Hassanain

Ola Hassanain is an artist with degrees in architecture, cultural identity, and globalization. She has an MFA with distinction from HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht. Her artwork is informed by the cultural, political, and societal position of women in Khartoum, including her own experiences and her family’s diaspora. Her project Back and Forth (2016–ongoing) deals with the link between women, public space, and policies in Khartoum. Her involvement in the Dutch art scene has been critical for developing her work on culture-specific gender and spatial politics. Hassanain lives and works in Khartoum and Utrecht.

Fellowship Research Trajectory

Ola Hassanain works with women’s experiences of gender and public space in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. She examines how state policies regulate perceptions of these experiences. Through photographic and video documentation, as well as a series of working group sessions, the phases of her research project Back and Forth: Space, Policies, and Women imagine policy in the form of a public “spatial conversation” and shift the site of policy creation from the private to the public sphere. This shift in dynamic aims to mediate active roles for those affected by existing policies in imagining new possibilities for political dialogue. The project zooms in on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as examples of policy-making spaces that use reductive aesthetic representations, notably in gender-oriented publications, to shape perceptions of gender. The current phase of Back and Forth, titled “Doing Family: Dialectics of Gender and Policy,” operates as a tool for doing family in diaspora and a model for a counter strategy of exchange with NGOs that re-articulates the hegemonic relations between and narratives of gender, space, and policy without using the categories of artistic representation imposed by the NGOs.

Sepake Angiama Curator of 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial

BAK 2017/2018 Fellow Sepake Angiama co-curates the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial …And Other Such Stories.  As part of the program, Fellow 2017/2018 BAK Fellows Ola Hassanain’s work was part of the exhibition. From the curators’ statement: “Titled …and other such stories, the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial is rooted in close readings of the spatial realities of its […]

Ola Hassanain Awarded Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize and Shows at Two International Architecture Exhibitions

BAK 2017/2018 Fellow Ola Hassanain was awarded a 2019/2020 Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize, and has work in the Sharjah Architecture Triennial Rights of Future Generations (2019–2020) and Chicago Architecture Biennial …And Other Such Stories (2019–2020) curated by Fellow BAK 2017/2018 Fellow Sepake Angiama. Congratulations to Ola on the opportunities!

Isshaq Al-Barbary, Ola Hassanain, Jeanne van Heeswijk, and Charl Landvreugd join Urban Front for Training “Urban Practices and the Future of the City”

BAK 2017/2018 Fellows Isshaq Al-Barbary and Ola Hassanain, as well as 2018/2019 Fellows Jeanne van Heeswijk and Charl Landvreugd join Urban Front (with Distinguished Professor David Harvey, Associate Professor Miguel Robles-Durán, artist Jeanne Van Heeswijk, curator and writer Laura Raicovich, activist and politician Gala Pin, urban sociologist Laia Forne) and guests Charli Herrington and Carina […]

Yara Sharif: Architecture of Resistance

As part of a session convened and moderated by 2017/2018 BAK Fellow Ola Hassanain, Yara Sharif gave a seminar (via Skype), discussing, in particular her text  “Cultivating spatial possibilities in Palestine: searching for sub/urban bridges in Beit Iksa, Jerusalem” (by Nasser Golzari and Yara Sharif); and more generally unpacking alternative means to re-read and redraw […]

Program