Ola Hassanain
Artist in Residence, Stockholm 5 December 2026 – 4 February 2027
Ola Hassanain is an artist and educator with an architectural background, whose practice spans architecture, film, and spatial strategies. Engaging with climate instability, postcolonial legacies, and displacement, her work examines how power is embedded in the built environment.
Photo: Anna Lakeman
Ola Hassanain
While in residency, Hassanain will be working on a script. The text will not be a rigid document but an open score for performance, sound, image-making and dialogue, informed by the theoretical understanding that a “script denotes not a rigid dictation of performed action but, rather, a necessary openness to resistance, interpretation, and improvisations” (Material Culture and the Performance of Race). By situating the simultaneous histories of the Gezira Scheme under the Anglo-Egyptian Empire and the Sudanese experience within the live, contested geographies of migration, this project seeks to make a concrete mirroring: it will produce an artistic work that speculates on pluralistic identities while creating a temporary, collaborative space to critically examine the material legacies we inherit and the new scripts we might write. Hassanain believes that this process can assist in building new spatial lexicons.
Hassanain is currently a PhD in Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Her work has been presented internationally, including at the Chicago Architecture Biennial; Sharjah Architecture Triennial; Tate Modern; the Stedelijk Museum; Van Abbe Museum; Istanbul Biennale; Berlin Art Week; FRAC Paris; IKON Gallery; Birmingham; Het Nieuwe Instituut; BAK basis voor kunst Utrecht; CASCo Utrecht; and Kunstinstituut Melly. Her work is in the collections of Hartwig Art Foundation, Fonds régional d’art contemporain (FRAC), and Van Abbe Museum.
@olahassanain