Ola Hassanain—trained as an architect in Sudan and currently residing in Amsterdam—uses her artistic practice to cultivate ‘space as discourse’. Her work, spanning installations, film and countermapping practices, critiques cultural and socio-political shifts in the African country through an incisive examination of cause and effect. Often influenced by her own experiences and diasporic existence in Europe, her work looks at moments of catastrophe. The theme of disaster—explored both in ecological and postcolonial temporalities—manifests in an ongoing solo exhibition at Kunstinstituut Melly, The Watcher, on view until September 21, 2025.

Makeshift bunds hold debris from collapsing onto the gallery floor. The bunds are supported by ropes tied to a pillar, the only structural elements in the gallery. On the opposite wall, words in a native language appear. The work, which features a central film installation, commissioned by BAK (basis voor actuele kunst), Utrecht, and presented at the Rotterdam-based art museum, moves between two seemingly contradictory positions. The first looks at the possibility of ecological collapse, while the second imagines a ‘historic future’ that traces the origin of slow violence in Sudan to technologies of water control in the Netherlands.

Sudan’s Gezira scheme, established by British colonial forces in 1925—once a major contributor to the country’s economy, providing support for agriculture—lies neglected today. While it continued to provide sustenance for the country post-independence, ongoing conflict, mismanagement and Sudan’s turn towards establishing an oil-based economy have rendered it mostly defunct today. In this barren landscape, a watcher adopts a practice of responsibility towards the ecology and local community through their watching in Hassanain’s film. They keep an eye out for rising water levels and early signs of flooding for the irrigation scheme. On the other hand, the watcher who acts as antipode to this act of responsibility surveils displaced populations, ensuring communities vacate areas earmarked for hydrological schemes. At the same time, this figure forewarns communities of their eviction. Both figures watch over precarious conditions of being. Framing the watcher in a conflicting role within the narrative, Hassanain draws connections between a present/future where hydrological technology has ravaged the terrain in Sudan, and a past of excess, where water as a resource was fruitfully harnessed for narratives of ‘progress’.

As Hassanain notes in conversation with STIR, the part of the watcher is meant to emphasise the paradoxes induced by modernity, as imposed on those living in the territory affected by the Gezira scheme. “I chose the watcher because the role of watching itself is my proposition of a way of inhabiting under impossibility. With this cycle of catastrophes that we can trace back to certain ideologies of modernity and colonialism, inhabiting space becomes a difficult thing to do or is almost premised on impossibility [for certain populations],” the contemporary artist explains.

The impossibility of inhabiting certain terrains arises from Hassanain’s own experience of growing up in Khartoum. In conversation with STIR, she relates the beginning of the catastrophe to her family fleeing their home to shelter from civil war in the country. Hence, the dual role of the watcher in the exhibition becomes a medium for her to highlight precarity—the precariousness of inhabiting difficult terrain, of having to deal with the climate crisis, and also the uncertain nature of existence for many communities in the region facing displacement due to still prevalent irrigation networks.

The oscillation and often correlation between moments of catastrophe and ecological and social responsibility are quite strong within the showcase. The precarity coming to define the experience of those who live in regions forever mutated by the extractivist and controlling nature of colonialism becomes potent when presented through the lens of the watcher. There is both a sense of urgency and bated anticipation that marks the existence of the figure in the film. It seems as if Hassanain wants the viewer (also a watcher in some sense) to occupy this state of liminality—temporalities that do not privilege linear ideas of progress and a means of making sense of existence in conditions of uncertainty. She notes to STIR, “If you put people under a condition of them not being able to reflect their political aspirations and desire directly onto their environment, that, to me, is the catastrophe in itself. It becomes impossible, really, to envision a future. When you think about it like that, there is a bit of a suspension in time. If I can't go forward, and I can't go backwards, then where will I go, under the linear logic of modernism?”

Within the work on display, there is a clear sense of how time divides what is possible and what is not. Linear time—defined by a march forward towards progress—makes different ways of being or thinking about the future impossible. Referring to Brazilian theorist Leda Maria Martins’ conception of spiralling time, Hassanain continues, “I find the aspect of thinking through a spiralling time very generative to this idea of a cyclic catastrophe. With a spiral, of course, the starting point doesn't really move, but it goes to infinity, and sometimes even expands and can envelop the whole world in a way.”

Practising temporal disjuncture as a way to imagine otherwise, she notes, “That's why I positioned the watcher in parts of the film, to evoke a sort of schism. This is someone who's meandering through these hydraulically engineered projects that the Dutch came up with, and eventually exported to the world. Yet nowadays, while this technology is maintained and kept operative, it’s not [actually functional].” This tension between materiality and obsolescence, between construction and ruin, the past and present, is palpable in the references to spatial technologies in the show.

Drawing attention to irrigation networks and their manipulation of terrain in Sudan, Hassanain hopes to reveal how these networks also control bodies and histories, resulting in erasures. “Water is situated culturally for me as something that hosts and nurtures,” she notes. Speaking about her showcase, she says, “In this project, it has brought about the focus on soil and water and how these have become inscribed into the capital accumulation and ecological erasure. I focus on these temporalities and see what is in our direct surroundings that seems to be involved in a moment of catastrophe.” Both time and water are relentless. Thinking of the fluvial as both an entity of world-building and destruction, Hassanain asks how we witness what has been lost, and how we remain attentive to what is still unfolding.

Ola Hassanain’s solo exhibition ‘The Watcher’ is on view from May 17 – September 21, 2025, at Kunstinstituut Melly, Netherlands.