Christina Hajjar: Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings

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Christina Hajjar, "Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings," 2021

Christina Hajjar's 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 and language through methods of repetition, recontextualization, and glitch. The photographs in this work 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—among a backdrop of blue sky, performing improvisational gestures with a plastic tablecloth. The TV in the exhibition remediates the spectacle of lavish culture often represented through music videos emanating from restaurant TVs, and engages the tablecloth once again to evoke questions on luxury, ritual, and translatability. Together, these elements work to ground diasporic longing and nourishment through mimetic gestures, which are at once solid and fleeting.

Hajjar thanks PLATFORM, Canada Council for the Arts, and Manitoba Arts Council for their generous support of this exhibition.

BIOGRAPHY – Christina Hajjar is a queer femme first-generation Lebanese-Canadian artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty 1 Territory. She is passionate about collaboration and skills-sharing as tools of community-building and resistance. Her practice deals with diaspora, defiance, intergenerational inheritance, body archives, cultural iconography, labour, and place. Hajjar is a 2020-21 recipient of the Foundation Mentorship Program at Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art and a 2020 PLATFORM Photography Award winner. She is a 2020-21 curatorial intern at the School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba where she curated an online SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) Film Festival and a group exhibition on queer diaspora, cause to become. Hajjar is a co-founder of Carnation Zine and recently published a solo zine, Diaspora Daughter, Diaspora Dyke. Learn more at @garbagebagprincess and https://christinahajjar.com/.