As part of CC10, Copenhagen Contemporary presents artist Lina Hashim, whose practice operates at the intersection of sculpture, installation, performance, and the public realm.

The work Odalisque takes its point of departure in Western art history, where binarity in particular has been represented and depicted. In this performance, the exclusive use of binary principles to divide the audience may create a sense of discomfort.

In Odalisque, the audience journeys into the artistic practice of Lina Hashim herself as a female visual artist with a Muslim cultural background. At the same time, they are taken into Western, white art history, where the portrayed brown woman is often the odalisque: a silent, seductive female slave in a harem. Through this work, Hashim seeks to redefine the narratives that have been told throughout art history and to create a space for retelling the entrenched ideology of the erotic harem. Hashim is interested in representations of the odalisque figure in Western painting—particularly during the period of Orientalism—as a masculine, colonial construct, as well as in contemporary ideas of liberation and the “rescue” of this same woman.

Lina Hashim (b. 1978, Kuwait) is a Danish-Iraqi artist whose work emerges from experiences of migration and movement between cultures. Her practice examines how bodies, structures, and gazes mutually shape one another. Through repetition, ornamentation, archival material, and spatial constructions, Hashim creates sensorial and political situations—both in urban spaces and within institutional contexts.

Lina Hashim is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and works between Copenhagen and New York.