Ola Abdelazim Hassanain, born in Khartoum, comes
from an architectural background with projects that
focus on cultural identity and globalization. Her art
work explores gender, public space and policies in
Khartoum. Her practice tries to re-articulate notions
of space to speak to these policies.

My artwork departs from an ambition of using
narratives of subjects that come from particular
context as guidelines for my visual material. My
projects take it a subject at a time and treats
them as sources of information and so works with a
conceptual notion that there exists different centres
of knowledge. In a sense there already are, but
political and theoretical pressures accord particular
salience to some differences, for example identities
based on class, race, and ethnicity etc. My
artwork does not enact the historical conclusion
of these difference constructs of subjects and their
perceptions of space, but rather seeks to trouble
the narrative of notions of looking at space. Our
perception of the world lies in how we position
ourselves within the space and objects that make
our surrounding and what action we are playing
out in that surrounding. My artwork explores the
question: How then, does one rearticulate space?
The predominant “truths” about themes like gender,
policies and space find validation within the
structures that make them, which allows them to be
truths. To counter that, there should therefore, be
as many centers as there are subjects to generate
such information that is compatible with their
differences.