As my partner and I drove across the Prairie landscape from Winnipeg (Treaty 1 Territory) to Regina (Treaty 4 Territory), we moved through familiar winds and big open skies. It was one year after presenting my first solo exhibition, “Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings” at PLATFORM Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, and I was installing it again at Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre, a mere six-hour drive from home. Her hands on the steering wheel, I fed my lover store-bought hummus and crackers as she kept her eyes on the road.
Land of Living Skies. The license plate slogan filled me with wonder as we entered the province of Saskatchewan. Given my affinity for sky watching, and the ways in which my project takes so much inspiration from the sky, it felt appropriate. Driving through downtown to reach the Regina Public Library, I screamed “babe!” pointing to a vehicle just ahead of us, with a vanity plate bolstering “ZEIT2”—zeit meaning oil in Arabic, and zeitoon meaning olive. My excitement grew as the car took the same turn as us, convinced—hopeful—that they were driving to the same destination.
Image description: A colour photograph of a hotel room with large windows overlooking a city and clear skies. A white duvet billows over the bed. A blue, dolphin-shaped, helium balloon floats at the end of the bed. A vase of red roses sits on the window sill.
Above: Christina Hajjar, Libnan, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
Image description: A poem in white text on a sky-blue gradient reads, “Libnan/ we will light the clouds/ on fire in memory of you/ ya habibti ya helwe/ your beauty swells over/ your tired edges/ naked skies/ I don’t want to be a resilient people/ searching/ the grounds of a cluttered heart/ I woke we dissied/ no homeland/ a chainsmoker like you/ inshallah the rain/ rinse the rubble/ and ash without bones/ shaking”
On the same weekend as the opening of my show, I was also directing and hosting the SWANA Film Festival at the Regina Public Library Film Theatre. I longed to connect with Arab and SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) communities in the city, and invite them to these events. I met a few people through my work in Regina, yet the struggle to find community felt similar to my longing in Winnipeg. One more turn towards the library, but ZEIT2 kept on straight.
Still, the weekend turned out to be full of friendship and play. I felt a freedom and affirmation I have not felt in a long time. A Winnipeg friend who had moved to Regina spent countless hours with my partner and me. Two other Winnipeg friends—one of them who had moved continents—surprised me by knocking on my hotel door just hours before the opening reception of my exhibition. Gifts in hand, their smiling eyes overtook their masked mouths. All of us, dispersed across cities and countries, were together in the here and now.
I felt assured in my intention to activate my exhibition with food, friendship, and leisure. As an installation inspired by hookah lounges, I was eager to create a place where people could relax. I researched Middle Eastern restaurants in the city and reached out to make sure they were Arab-owned. I ordered manakeesh, karak tea, and walnut atayef from a Syrian-owned cafe, and presented the offerings over a patterned plastic tablecloth—an object that recurs in my work.
Image description: A poem in white text on a sky-blue gradient reads, “shaking/ diaspora like the language/ I wish to love you in chorus/ of hookahs/ in vigil we taste/ the salt the mourning sea soft/ like my blooming tongue will I ever/ eat again/ without thinking of your hunger/ the colour red yo’burni/ but let the rose bush sing/ etch lost flesh/l ost/ poems dizzy/ with myrrh/ though the door is open/ you have always looked/ best in gold”
Thinking through notions of hospitality, I wanted to welcome guests into a specific environment that considered place-making through furniture (a way for people to feel comfortable), backgammon (a cultural activity to engage people with), and music (to increase energy and ambiance). Instead of performing the labour of serving food to the guests, I set up the space so they could serve themselves. I spent the evening conversing with people, pointing them to different areas of the exhibition, and inviting them to play a game of backgammon. I gushed over the shesh besh/backgammon boards, handmade with oak wood, olive wood, and mother of pearl, purchased on Etsy and delivered from Beirut. It was the first time I received a package from Lebanon—a small token of a home that I have never had the privilege of visiting. Coincidentally, the store also sold the disposable cups I had previously scoured the internet for—cups with the iconic Lebanese pattern on it, which my friend told me is also iconic to Ethiopia.
When I think of actual hookah lounges or ones in the cultural imaginary, they are always transcultural and transient spaces of kinship and sharing. To emphasize the variety of experiences one might have at a hookah lounge, and to involve more collaborators in my project, I commissioned three people to create playlists for the exhibition. I prompted them to collect songs that they would like to listen to while smoking shisha in public or private spaces. Dana Qaddah, cdallasl, and Noel Maghathe created the playlists that included a range of genres from traditional Arabic music to contemporary hip hop and R&B. I wanted the music that gallery visitors encountered to alternate, in order to keep the space alive and unexpected. I also made the Spotify playlists available to the public indefinitely, both as a keepsake accessible through a QR code in the gallery, and as an online offering for people who could not visit the show.
As we pored over backgammon and food, visitors turned to watch a new video work, which depicted me getting tattooed while smoking shisha. I was keen to show off my new rose tattoo in real life. I had hired my friend to do it: an adaptation of the rose cluster designed from the plastic tablecloth I have grown so attached to, now forever etched on my calf. It is an ode to my mom and sister, after we each promised to get rose tattoos for each other. Materialized on my body and in some of the other works in the exhibition, the presence of my family is important to me in thinking through diasporic placemaking.
Image description: Christina Hajjar, Noor Bhangu, and Mariana Muñoz Gomez pose for a photo inside the exhibition at Neutral Ground Artist-Run Centre, “Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings” by Christina Hajjar. Christina stands in the centre, looking directly at the camera while holding a phone receiver to her ear as a monitor plays her video installation on the wall behind her.
In order to include my late father in the gathering, I placed a full cup of coffee on a floating shelf as a makeshift altar for him, beside a poem I dedicated to Libnan. This gesture was an experiment in communication: using the six-week exhibition run to evaporate his coffee in order to reveal a fortune—using tasseography as a grief ritual. I had done this once before, when I placed a full cup of coffee on my dad’s altar for his death anniversary. I had Instagrammed a photo of it—a still life of significant objects—along with excerpts from Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence, where he laments the bittersweetness of longing. “It is a healthy kind of ache,” he writes, “because it reminds us that we are afflicted with hope and are sentimental.”
After the opening hours for the reception passed, my friends and I were still absorbed in our moments of celebration and exchange. We decided to have a photoshoot, and made our way around the gallery, posing in spontaneous tableaus. Afterwards, we went to the local gay bar, and within a couple hours, I declared it my favourite gay bar. It was my first time embracing the dance floor since the pandemic started in 2020. Everything felt easy that night, like I didn’t need to try to have a good time. The proximity of the oversized speaker thumped my body back to life, as the fog machine and light show bathed us in a queer ritual of becoming—surging the oceans of my blood.
The morning after, we drove to the hot springs in Moose Jaw, 45 minutes west of Regina. I eagerly embraced more Prairie driving and intimate conversations that did not stop upon our arrival. The five of us glided in the warm waters through the half-concealed and half-exposed structure. Salt and minerals wafted under our faces along with the smells of sweat and sanitization. Dark pubes peeked through white high-waisted underwear masquerading as a bathing suit. We laughed and huddled around our friend, shielding her from the unknowing guests. Her tattooed brown femme hairiness encircled by our collective presence in the pool—gay, racialized, and opinionated. Next to us sat a white woman circling her thickly sunscreened palms onto her companion’s pink bald head, their gazes trained on us. Turning away from our onlookers, we collectively soaked under the blue sky golden light and luxuriated in our topics and adoration for one another.
After the spa and lunch, exhaustion quickly set in as the euphoria began to fade with the expectation of goodbyes. We made one last stop into the crystal store to commemorate the trip with a souvenir. Like the semi-artificial naturalness of the mineral pool, we were here for the manufactured authenticity of polished stones. My eyes gravitated to the words on the wall of ailments and cures: “MEMORY: Quartz, Pyrite, Rhodonite, Emerald, Fluorite.” The handwritten sharpie sign was my guide. Once arriving at the emerald, it was a done deal. “Preserves Love,” the wallet-sized card read. “The stone of goddess Venus. Feminine. Earth. True abundance energy.” Clutching my memory—my promise—we drove back to Regina, and I spent the evening smoking weed out the hotel window, listening to seagulls circling the sky, and imagining the beach.
Driving home to Winnipeg the next day with my helium dolphin balloon dancing in the car, a jar of pink roses, and the sunroof open to let in the land of the living skies once more, I cried for the end of the trip and for the space that friendship had created. These past few days, we had coalesced in an immersive incubator that could never be repeated. Its temporariness weighed on me, instantly transforming the moment into nostalgia. Up above emerged a trans sunset— the kind my friend in Regina had named as their favourite part of living there. The extraordinary pink and blue sky was my perfect finale, a blanket I was ready to receive. Though we lost “ZEIT2” days ago, this path had been just as meaningful.
Thank you to Noor Bhangu, Crystal Le, and BlackFlash for their editorial support on this essay. I would also like to acknowledge Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council, and Winnipeg Film Group for their generous support of my exhibition.
Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada on Treaty 1 Territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. As a queer femme and first-generation subject, she is invested in the poetics of process, translation, and collaborative labour. https://christinahajjar.com
This article is published in issue 39.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue
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