At the centre of A Whispering Dam (2024) is a 2.2-metre-high sculptural form evoking the modernist infrastructure of the Sennar Dam that channels the Blue Nile into Gezira. A sound piece embedded within it plays a whispered ruqya (ُ رُُقُُیة ), a protective incantation that acts as both sonic cleansing and resistance against the forces of nature. Framed photographs show her grandmother’s house atop unstable clay soil, its cracked walls and dried earth forming material records of collapse. The installation presents an ecology in which water, clay, light and memory resist colonial time and linear progress, favouring seepage, ritual and suspension as forms of knowledge and witnessing.
In the film The Watcher (2024), the figure of the sentinel, a community caretaker who monitors rising water levels and flood risk first guards against the agricultural crisis in Sudan, alert to subtle shifts in the landscape. The sentinel then appears in a future realm of the Netherlands’ Waterloopbos, a former hydraulic-testing site, where he observes exported technologies of water control. Here, watching becomes a form of care and endurance that exceeds repair, inviting us to dwell with brokenness and recalibrate our relationship to space, time and memory.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Ola Hassanain (b. 1985, Khartoum) is an artist currently based in Amsterdam. Her work considers the politics of habitation, moving through architecture, film, performance and installation to reflect on how ecological and social systems shape one another across time, as well as on how power becomes visible and felt through built environments. Her solo exhibitions include The Watcher (Tell The Waters What The Clay Kept Secret III), Kunstinstitut Melly, Rotterdam (2025) and Whispers (Tell The Waters What The Clay Kept Secret II), Büro Stedelijk, Amsterdam (2024). Her group exhibitions include The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet, Border Buda Project, Brussels (2025); All That We Have Built, Naughton Gallery, Queen’s University, Belfast (2025); Triënnale van Beetsterzwaag, Kunsthuis SYB (2024); the 3rd Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019).
EXHIBITED WORKS
Ola Hassanain (b. 1985)
A Whispering Dam,2024
Tarp, water, sound, wood, plaster, paint, vinyl prints
Variable dimensions
A Whispering Dam was originally conceived as an intervention to be erected in the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, with the design support of Andrés Novo.
Courtesy of the artist
Ola Hassanain (b. 1985)
The Watcher,2024
Single-channel video, 16:9, colour, 19:19 min, stereo
Commissioned by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and made possible with the additional generous support of Kunstinstituut Melly
Courtesy of the artist
