تقبرني (Ta’burni), 2020 Photography/Digital Collage 24×36 تقبرني (Ta’burni) is a recipe moodboard representing the dish, kafta, a recipe recorded from Hajjar’s mother. The recipe and moodboard belong to an ongoing collection of works for Hajjar’s memoir cookbook in progress. Hajjar’s moodboards are third spaces of identity and belonging; they are aesthetic rituals of image-making as…
Christina Hajjar and Noelle Sagher’s moodboards explore the overlaps of their interrelated cultures. Working as diasporic Arab millennial artists based in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Treaty 1 Territory and Homeland of the Métis Nation), they arrange adornments, cultural paraphernalia, and storied foods to create a third space of identity and belonging. This aesthetic ritual of home-making and self-portraiture…
In Ghanouj Christina Hajjar engages love languages of her diasporic arab femme identity. Situated at a coffee table, she uses roses, rose tea, and sweethearts through sculpture, consumption, and recitation. Curated by Noor Bhangu, Ghanouj was performed at Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet: Performative Body Archives in Contemporary Art, Gallery 1C03, where performance remants remained exhibited…
Carnation is a submission-based zine that publishes art and writing created through a lens of diaspora and displacement by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour). Carnation is co-founded, edited, and designed by Christina Hajjar, Luther Konadu, and Mariana Muñoz Gomez. Volume 1 (Fall 2018) 5.5×8.5 38 colour pages 17 contributors $5-15 sliding scale (pay…
Whiny Femmes is a submission-based collection of art and writing by queer femmes of all genders. The zine is a space to honour the multiplicity of femme lived experience and is an attempt to foster a space of sharing, tenderness, resistance, and healing. Whiny Femmes celebrates sassy/ grumpy/ sad/ pouty/ loudmouth/ extra/ resilient/ resistant/ badass/ bratty/ takenoshit/ tough/ tender/ bitter/ sweet…
Warak Arish #1-20 is a performative work in progress since 2017. Following the celebration of Hajjar’s family’s celebration of living in Canada for 20 years, the artist will unravel a can of warak arish in a different site per year lived in Canada. This work is informed by questions on home, displacement, assimilation, and settler…
Published in Return Atacama (2019), Gesture Series, HemiPress, 2019. Monica Mercedes Martinez (poem) & Christina Hajjar (filming & editing), Winter Road, 2018, 34 sec, Atacama Desert, Chile.
Hajjar’s practice is invested in food and its biographical, geographic, intimate, and performative qualities. Salt Stain is a video installation around her processes with warak arish (stuffed grape leaves) that demonstrate her relationship with her mother’s body memory and with land, labour, and home. The two videos—shown simultaneously side-by-side at the corner of a room—involve…
preserve/decay is part of a working series where Hajjar learns and records her mother’s recipes, then performs a reflective process after each one. This process deepens her connection with a feminist praxis between the kitchen, her family’s stories, feminist scholars, and her body. Following her learning on baklava, she asked her mother for more knowledge…
Homesick is part of a working series of experimental performances in response to my experiences of Lebanese diaspora. This series involves cooking with my mother and recording her recipes since she does everything from body memory. With each food item that I learn I perform a reflective response to deepen my connection and engage…
CONSTELACIONES was a project-based collective for the performance project, Return Atacama, where the group traveled to Chile’s infamously storied Atacama Desert to return a large set of vibrant sculptural forms. The heavy ceramic forms, created by Monica Martinez, are woven from stratified layers of Chilean history and from diasporic and nomadic trajectories resulting from the 1973 coup. CONSTELACIONES…
