A solo exhibition by Christina Hajjar

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 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. 

Christina Hajjar thanks Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council, and Winnipeg Arts Council for funding this project. 

April 12 - May 10, 2025

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 1:00-5:00 PM 
Mask Days: Saturdays April 26th and May 10th 
Closed Saturday, April 19 for Easter long weekend 

Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings by Christina Hajjar opens Saturday, April 12, 6:00-9:00 PM.
Artist exhibition tour begins at 7:00 PM