Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam

Waters. Watching Temporalities.

Ola Hassanain

Monday 11 December, 18.00hrs
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Main Building, Church Hall (HG-16A00)

Performance and Panel Discussion (co-sponsored by Greenhouse Stavanger)

Please be on time, as there will be on entrance to the performance after the start (in order to avoid disturbances). After the performance, and after a short break, we will continue with a panel discussion with Ola Hassanain, Quinsy Gario, Katja Kwastek, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, and students from the MA Arts & Culture at VU Amsterdam. 

Ola Hassanain’s Tell The Water What The Clay Kept Secret is ongoing visual research that grapples extensively with the ‘spatial’ implications of catastrophe. The work, conceptualized from an ongoing poetics of ‘space making’ interrogates sculptural abstraction and various ecologies of inhabiting. In the performance, Ola Hassanain hones in on an intimate and familiar ‘site of catastrophe’ – her grandmother’s house. This undertaking is done with a certain obstinacy in order to narrativize the ecological dilemmas that foreclose the possibility of inhabitation. Yuma Haram’s house sits amidst the architectonic structures of water control within the Gezira scheme in Sudan, a network of canals of irrigation and slopes also commonly referred to as the breadbasket of the world.  In her presentation, the artist tries to both entangle and analyse her grandmother’s political aspirations, in order to symbolically preserve this intimate structure – embodied in a prayer which calls to ‘watch the cracks’- alongside moments that highlight external factors through history that have dictated the use of the house. What does one make of all these floating / fleeting and/or transitory calls against ecological emptying – as the catastrophes continue?  How do we amplify, thereby applying actions to the incessant call to keep what matters to us?

Biography

Ola Hassanain is an artist with degrees in architecture, cultural identity, and globalization. She 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. She has an MFA with distinction from HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht. In 2022 and 2023, she was a resident at Rijksakademie Amsterdam. Her artwork is informed by the cultural, political, and societal position of women in Khartoum, including her own experiences and her family’s.

Please note: to access the Church Hall, take the elevator to the 16^th floor. From there, stairs lead to the Church Hall. Please contact us in case of mobility issues.

The performance and panel discussion are co-sponsored by Greenhouse Stavanger in the context of a cooperation of the Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam, the Greenhouse Stavanger, and the Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol, exploring the role of storytelling within the Environmental Humanities.

Image Credit: Image taken by Rayan Osama (a cousin of the artist) to show the state of her grandmother’s house in the Gezira province in Sudan.