Ceramics become a recurring ground for their ability to absorb the socio-political and cultural aspects embedded within it. Urban and industrial remnants recur in the work, drawn by their ambiguous past and circulation. Their incorporation is meant to amplify their uncertain status.
At the core of the work lies an interest in process as a form of knowledge. This extends beyond objects into the design of shared workspaces intendend as environments that support exchange and collaboration.
Glaze development for Ola’s Hassanein’s solo The Watcher
2025
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. As she notes, “observation summons a form of power”.
In The Watcher, her solo exhibition at Kunstinstituut Melly, Ola reflects on the act of watching as a form of responsibility—of bearing witness to both environmental and political catastrophe. Central to the project is the figure of the watcher, drawn from Sudan’s Gezira irrigation scheme: a community caretaker who monitors water levels and signals early signs of floor. Rooted in communities facing environmental precarity, including Ola’s own, the role becomes a lens for considering how people respond to the slow unfolding of catastrophe—whether natural or engineered.
[...] Across the exhibition, Ola reflects on how spatial technologies—retaining walls, thresholds, irrigation networks—are implicated in broader questions of control and erasure. These built forms, designed to manage movement and resources, also manage bodies and histories. Her work asks how we witness what has been lost, and how we remain attentive to what is still unfolding. Watching, in this sense, becomes a mode of resistance: a way to stay with the trouble of living within unstable ground.