Ola Hassanain: The Watcher

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.

The exhibition’s central film installation moves between two roles inhabited by the same performer. One watches within an agricultural landscape, observing for signs of ecological crisis—mud, storm surges, rising water—alerting others to the slow violence of uninhabitability. In a temporal fold, this same figure inhabits his “historic future” in Waterloopbos, a former hydraulic testing site in the Netherlands where technologies of water control were developed and later exported to colonial contexts such as the Gezira scheme. The second watcher appears in the urban margins, surveilling the displaced—those now framed as “debris” while also acting as a double informant: warning residents ahead of their forced removal, resisting the machinery of state control. As Ola describes, “they watch for the catastrophe of modernity, which brings a continuous cycle of removal and arrival.”

Debris, in Ola’s work, is both material and metaphor. It stands in for the residue of systems, cycles, and histories that displace and erode. Watching becomes a way to read this residue—a mode of resistance, of staying with what remains. “Our bodies are also fragments of modernity,” she notes. “We shore up different spaces but we also shore up different ideas and aspirations for a different political ecology.”

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.

The film The Watcher (edition I of III) is commissioned by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, and presented at Kunstinstituut Melly in its current iteration. The project was made possible with the support of artist Oded Rimon; videography by Juan Arturo Garcia; performance by Hammo Salhein; calligraphy by Tewa Barnosa; and production by Shantell Palmer. Special thanks to Marianne Peijnenburg, Benedetta Pompili, Asbeter, and Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg, Carly Rose Bedford, and Jeanne van Heeswijk.