Christina Hajjar: Don't Forget the Water

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5 minutes 13 sec

A phone conversation sets the diasporic table as a disembodied figure prepares Qahwah Arabi / Arabic Coffee. Here, the contradictions inherent in Google Translate’s instant camera feature are made visible through glitched mistranslations. Using these flaws as a prompt, the communication between a mother and a daughter considers ambiguity as a source of embodied knowledge.

Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese Canadian artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg, Manitoba 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. Hajjar was a recipient of the 2020 PLATFORM Photography Award. Her film Don’t Forget the Water won the Jury Award and Audience Choice Award at the 2021 Gimli Film Festival, as well as an honourable mention for the 2021 Emerging Digital Artists Award.