Fantastic Wednesday: Back and Forth by Ola Hassanain

Under the title Fantastic Wednesday the PhD in Practice Program opens its doors to the Academy, friends, and other interested people. One of the candidates shares their work with a larger audience and receives feedback through friendly conversation over drinks and nibbles.

Ola Hassanain?s project Back and Forth, deals with notions of Public Space and Gender in the context of Khartoum, Sudan. Her work attempts to generate new frameworks of political engagement in Khartoum by utilizing Artistic research- firstly, as a space that mediates the dialectics of both Gender and Public Space and secondly, as the generator of aesthetics that articulate the complex makeup of Gender and Public Space. These two notions have placed some of us at certain distances from what has been formalized as ?life? and in that conjunction comes the role of one?s praxis, to question and reconfigure what Art can do for us, as action, as aesthetics and positionality in our lives.

Ola Hassanain is a Sudanese Artist and trained Architect who currently works between Khartoum and Netherlands. She graduated from the University of Khartoum with a Bsc. Architecture and has an MA Architecture, Cultural Identity and Globalisation from the University of Westminster. She was awarded the Quintin Hogg International scholarship and was shortlisted for the HKU innovation Award in 2016 upon finishing her MA Fine Art in HKU University of the Arts Utrecht.