Ola Hassanain

Friday late morning—Presentation
These walls: Grammars and humanly workable geographies

Early in her architecture career, Ola Hassanain developed a growing sense of frustration over the gulf between architectural theory and the real-world actualities of the built environment. As she pursued advanced degrees, she trained her focus on the subtle politics of space—namely, how built spaces react to, and reinforce, violence from state entities. When her family scattered across the globe due to economic collapse in Sudan, as part of the largest emigration flux the country has witnessed in contemporary times, her fascination with the ways the built environment reflects, responds to, and shapes the lives of those who inhabit it, increased. Her most recent work explores an idea of “space as discourse,” an expanded notion of space that encompasses political and environmental questions. Her work tries to develop a spatial vocabulary that follows how ruptures presented by political events in Khartoum, make it possible to aspire to new kinds of ecology. 

Born 1985, Khartoum, Sudan; lives and works in Khartoum, Sudan and Utrecht, Netherlands