Artist and architect Ola Hassanain intertwines family history with the materiality and temporality of water and clay. For this manifestation, Hassanain shares her ongoing visual research into the spatial implications of catastrophes. In this provocation the artist zooms in on an intimate ‘site of catastrophe’: her grandmother’s house. The house sits amidst the Gezira scheme in Sudan, a 4,300-kilometer network of canals and ditches whose work is to irrigate fields. The area is renowned for its vast agricultural produce, yet the scheme has led to ecological dilemmas that threaten inhabitation. The mismanagement of the irrigation scheme paired with a lack of desilting has jeopardized the soil in many areas. Hassanains grandmother’s house lays on a compromised plot of the soil, cracks weave down from the top of the house throughout the walls of the home, carving into the soil. Over the past decades the house and the dams have begun to crumble. The temporality of water and clay, and their relationship to organic uses of the land, rather than industrial practices, offer an alternative narrative to this political family history. One might approach the cracks in the clay, as a fractured system. The cracks weave themselves through all the houses, and as Hassanain herself notes, “cracks run through our lives”. With a keen eye on the subtle politics of space, Hassanain’s work unveils the ways in which physical structures both reflect and regulate human existence amidst the tumult of state violence. Through sculptural installations, photographs, sound work and ceramics, Hassanain visualizes the complex relationship between space, power, and ecology. In the space she introduces the whispering dam, which stands at 2.20 meters high as a relic of modernity, the whispers act as a filter for the water, allowing for the ritual of Ruqya ( ةيقر ) to rid it of its implications in the continuity of uninhabitability. In so doing, Hassanain combines the political undertones of her grandmother’s aspirations to watch the cracks with the ritual as a gesture for dislocating the water from a continuation of violence. This mixed media installation marks the beginning of an anthology of what it means to inhabit cyclic natures of catastrophe. Ola Hassanain's first solo Manifestation #26: Script 1: Whispers (Tell the Waters What the Clay Kept Secret II), is on show at Buro Stedelijk's Central Space from 23 May 2024 – 18 July 2024. Director: Tristan Hageman DP day 1: Pim Pimentel DP day 2: Sam Broekman Interview & Buro Stedelijk's Curator: Rita Ouédraogo Producer (50MM.AMSTERDAM): Franky Howe Producer (Buro Stedelijk): Hana Nina Hussein Producer (Buro Stedelijk): Sarah Schulten Edit: Tristan Hageman

• Trefwoorden
  monografie, Buro Stedelijk [Tentoonstellingen], beeld- en/of geluidsdrager, ecologie, water, klei
• Geografisch trefwoord
  Soedan (SD)
• Persoonstrefwoord
  Ola Hassanain