6 November 2021–20 January 2022
The opening takes place on 6 November 2021 and the exhibition is on view through 20 January 2022.
Visit this page to learn more about the opening program and how to visit.
Casco Art Institute in partnership with Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund 2020/2021 is proud to present Workable Geographies by artist and architect Ola Hassanain, an ongoing artistic research project that focuses on the relationship to land in Khartoum (the capital city of Sudan) and elsewhere. Hassanain visualizes data and conversations through maps and architectural forms in effort to capture the dynamic complexity of the built environment as an extension of human ecology.
At the center of the exhibition, a large mixed media installation composed of transparent acrylic columns, images, text, and sound serves as a terrain to map and analyze information gathered from research and dialogue with collaborators like Studio Urban, a Khartoum-based research studio focused on city life. Workable Geographies intends to channel and generate local and national conversations about land use, environmental justice, sustainable economic prosperity, democratic civic engagement, and relationships to physical space and place.
Ola Hassanain’s work focuses on how we can summon subjectivities to exist together outside state forces that cause displacement, and which regulate and hold the coding for the reality of lived life. In this project, sensing what we cannot confirm is tangible and a way of perceiving that might allow us to imagine futures that are lived differently. Hassanain proposes that we read across material collected about the ground we stand on, enclosures we inhabit, and specifically, what that could say about urbanity under the political climate in Khartoum.
Hassanain and her interdisciplinary collaborators and partners gather information and material through the use of the design methodology of “charreting” for their collective work in order to generate visions for the future. Charreting is an intense period of design or planning together using semantic analysis and brainstorming techniques. Hassanain’s Workable Geographies coalesces with Casco’s recurring inquiry into property relations and private/public dynamics, proposing an imagination and sense of the commons and commoning practice.
Image description: a solid background featuring the words ”There, is the city. And here, are my hands…”. Credit: Ola Hassanain, design, 2021.
