Hajra Waheed’s (b. 1980, Calgary/Montréal) works take visitors both above and below ground. Untitled (Map) is a classified map of the largest offshore oil field in the world, located 265 kilometers north of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where the artist spent her youth. The work is altered, folded, and elongated, suggesting a subterranean mountain range or an active pulse line at the heart of geopolitical warfare. Also on view are Still Against the Sky 1–3, three folded pages stippled with stars that convert the infinity of space into something pocketable, almost manageable.
Waheed’s works are riddled with images and symbols she developed as a child and later honed living in the gated headquarters of Saudi Aramco, where documentation in/of public spaces was forbidden. Her distinct visual language makes its way into scrapbooks and collaged diaries that introduce us to an intimate world investigating conditions of isolation, rootlessness, secrecy, censorship, and travel restrictions against the backdrop of increasing regional conflict.
Other inquiries that arise within Waheed’s practice include issues surrounding mass surveillance and covert power in the ongoing Drone Studies (2010–ongoing) and the continual unfurling of lost stories of displaced and disappeared persons in works such as The Anouchian Passport Portrait Series (2010–ongoing) and Sea Change (2011–ongoing). The latter, an ambitious multimedia work and visual novel, reveals the lives of nine characters over nine chapters – all of whom disappear while journeying by sea in the name of salvation, in search of a better life or a new one. Invariably, Waheed’s projects are like the revolving beam of a lighthouse, illuminating tidal waves from the permanent coming together and breaking apart of narratives and histories. MW
self-presentation:
Moonlight. How long does it take to reach us? -Just over a second.
And sunlight? -8 minutes.
