March 19 to April 17, 2021 PLATFORM Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts Solo exhibition awarded through the 2020 PLATFORM Photography Award Photos by Tayler Buss Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings is an installation inspired by hookah lounges, which incorporates photography, film, and wallpaper. It complicates an Arab diasporic experience by unpacking quotidian objects…
Type: Short film; ExperimentalRuntime: 4:41Shooting format: DigitalAspect ratio: 16:9Year: 2021 Synopsis: A phone conversation sets the diasporic table as a disembodied figure prepares Qahwah Arabi / Arabic Coffee. Here, the contradictions inherent in Google Translate’s instant camera feature are made visible through glitched mistranslations. Using these flaws as a prompt, the communication between a mother…
Featuring photography, poetry, and performance, Diaspora Daughter / Diaspora Dyke is a zine that contends with intergenerational inheritance, personal histories, pleasure, loss, love, and the formation of identity through visual representation. Created with the generous support of Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council, and Broken Pencil Magazine. A reflection on Lebanese queer diaspora,…
تقبرني (Ta’burni), 2020 Photography/Digital Collage 24×36 تقبرني (Ta’burni) is a response to kafta, a recipe recorded from Hajjar’s mother. The recipe and image belong to an ongoing collection of works for Hajjar’s memoir cookbook in progress. Dedicated to the artist’s partner, تقبرني is an expression of queer poc love and sharing of culture. Held by…
Performance at Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art November 1, 2019 Preparing and offering rose lemonade in a gallery kitchen, the artist gathers friends, family, and visitors in a communal experience as she creates and records a recipe.
A series of staged images, Hajjar’s Illuminations self portraits utilize the archive as a framing device to think through intergenerational inheritance, personal histories, pleasure, loss, love, and the formation of identity through visual representation. Hajjar uses her own body to perform notions of domesticity and queer femininity. Objects of cultural intimacy to both Hajjar and…
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…
Warak Arish #1-20 is a performative work in progress since 2017. Following 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 complicity.
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 performance 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. Two videos—shown simultaneously side-by-side at the corner of a room—involve gestures of…
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 in…
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…
CHRISTINA HAJJAR 