Winnipeg-based Lebanese artist Christina Hajjar’s Ottawa art exhibition is captivating gallery-goers this spring.
Tackling transcultural and familial connection, grief and homeland, Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings runs at Gallery 101 until May 10. Hajjar’s work shares Arab diasporic narratives through everyday objects, original short film and photography.
The exhibit is inspired by hookah lounges, establishments known for serving shisha, flavoured tobacco smoked through a hookah pipe. Hajjar said she modelled the exhibit after those spaces because of the esthetic possibilities for diasporic rituals and community-building.
“What happens when we gather and we share food is we practice community and build our movements based off of more than solidarity,” she said. “That’s what the work is about.”
She said she first considered the lounges’ symbolism while gazing up at LED signs outside a Winnipeg hookah lounge. She reflected on their glow in the wake of the August 2020 Beirut warehouse explosion that left more than 200 people dead, more than 7,000 injured and about 300,000 displaced.
“I felt what I always feel when things are happening back home, which is a sense of grief but disconnection,” Hajjar said, adding that she had never been to Lebanon herself.
“Going to a hookah lounge with a friend was a way to nourish that grief and provide healing, sustenance and connection to pleasure, culture and collectivity.”
One of her hookah lounge-inspired pieces, Sister, features four photos of Hajjar’s sister holding a windblown, mass-produced tablecloth with Arabic script and roses on it.
“Whenever I go to hookah lounges, I always see nostalgic landscape images of the homeland,” Hajjar said. “Because I have never been, I thought photographing my sister against the sky could be this universal depiction of diaspora and liminality.”
Using upward-angled shots capturing only an open blue sky background, Hajjar said she intended to evoke the idea of “placelessness but also everywhereness” in the setting, held together by the tablecloth.
Hajjar said this tablecloth and her own diasporic experience informed other works in the exhibit, including her experimental short film, Don’t Forget the Water.
Displayed on a TV and listened to through a landline telephone, Hajjar makes Arabic coffee on a table draped with the tablecloth from the Sister collection. At the same time, videos of Hajjar’s hands are projected onto the table.
As Hajjar’s mother explains the Arabic coffee-making process over the phone, Hajjar’s onscreen hands repeatedly smooth out mistranslations of the tablecloth’s Arabic phrase, whose English translation is the title of the exhibit.
Hajjar said the mistranslations represent how disconnection and diaspora have played into her recipe learning journey.
“I’m learning it second-hand, and my questions point to my failure, in a way,” she said.
In the phone conversation, Hajjar asks her mother questions like “Should it be on medium heat or high heat?” and “What do you mean, boil it ‘til the top is clear?”
Her mother’s answers seem painfully obvious: “It doesn’t matter,” and “You will see,” Hajjar’s mom says in the film.
“I think that’s a poignant depiction of embodied memory — how something like learning a recipe can only come through practice,” Hajjar said. “But the mistranslations can be a prompt.”
Exhibit attendee Liam Cresswell said this piece stood out to him the most because the intimacy of having the phone close to your ear feels like a conversation with one’s own mother.
“It feels like a window into a different world,” Cresswell said. “That intergenerational passing down of knowledge was super interesting.”
Nandini Gokhale, an exhibit attendee and gallery volunteer, echoed Creswell’s praise.
Gokhale added she was impressed with the overlapping elements in both of Hajjar’s films, calling them “thoughtfully put together.”
While the gallery’s main floor hosts most of Hajjar’s pieces, attendees are invited upstairs to watch her second short film, The Landmarks of Memory.
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.
“In that film, I’m getting the rose bundle from the tablecloth tattooed on me, so everything is tied together through the tablecloth and through roses scattered all over,” she explained.
“By making this work and then bringing it back to my family, I’m learning more about familial history and culture.”
Featured image by Grace Hawkes/the Charlatan
