Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings is an installation-based exhibition inspired by hookah lounges, sites of gathering, and diasporic fictions. It complicates the Arab diasporic experience by unpacking quotidian objects and language through methods of repetition, recontextualization, and glitch.
Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings explores transcultural and familial connections through placemaking. The photographs signal to the ways in which hookah lounges and restaurants often feature romantic landscape images of homeland. Since Hajjar has never been to Lebanon, the photographs only feature a figure—the artist’s sister—against a backdrop of blue sky, performing improvisational gestures with a plastic tablecloth.
Two experimental short films remediate the spectacle of lavish culture often represented through music videos emanating from lounge TVs. Don’t Forget the Water (2021) and The Landmarks of Memory (2023) engage the tablecloth to evoke questions on luxury, ritual, translation, and memorialization.
Together, these elements work to ground diasporic longing and nourishment through mimetic gestures, which are at once solid and fleeting.
Opening reception of Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings, 2025. Photos by Shelby Lisk. Gallery 101, Ottawa, ON, April 12 to May 10, 2025.
Opening reception of Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings, 2025. Photos by Kristina Corre. Gallery 101, Ottawa, ON, April 12 to May 10, 2025.
Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings, 2024. Photos 3-7 by Chris Miner. Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Kingston, ON, January 20 to March 16, 2024.
Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings, 2022. Photos by Daniel Paquet and Christina Hajjar. Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre, Regina, SK, April 9 to May 21, 2022.
Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings, 2021. Photos by Tayler Buss. PLATFORM Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, Winnipeg, MB, March 19 to April 17, 2021. Solo exhibition awarded through the 2020 PLATFORM Photography Award.
Thank you to Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council, and Winnipeg Arts Council for funding this project.
Essay series
The Summer of 2020 by Christina Hajjar, BlackFlash Magazine, 39.1, Spring 2022.
Land of Living Skies by Christina Hajjar, BlackFlash Magazine, 39.2, Fall 2022.
Claiming the Hookah Lounge, BlackFlash Magazine, 39.3, Winter 2023.
Responses
“Alternating between 1976 Beirut and a modern-day tattoo and hookah session, The Landmarks of Memory features another conversation between Hajjar and her mom responding to archival footage from the Lebanese Civil War. Hajjar described the making of The Landmarks of Memory as an artistic research process.” – Grace Hawkes, 2025
“It is not like a party; it is more like sneaking into another person’s house while in a dream. Although Hajjar has never visited Lebanon, it is at home in her heart. The exhibition is inviting and home-like while also being made up of distinct artworks.” – Shima Aghaaminiha & Shamim Aghaaminiha, 2022
“By involving her mother and sister in the creation of her work, Hajjar contributes to a growing diasporic methodology to rely on one’s immediate family to help fill knowledge gaps caused by forced or coerced migration. This aspect of the work not only reveals an intimate diasporic corporeality experienced adjacently amongst family, but also patterns of assimilation and hybridization they all navigate.” – Abedar Kamgari, 2021
“And so what remained? A plastic tablecloth. A misprinted memory. A shisha hiccup inside my lungs. The grief still lives there like an unborn creature. I wanted waterfalls and open sky and I found a cornerstore with no olive oil. It was okay though. I looked inside myself at the end and recognised some kind of being was there. I climbed out of my body and into the stars, rested on the moon for a few moments before returning back into the depths of the sea.” – Banah el Ghadbanah, 2021
Christina Hajjar 