Hajra Waheed is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Montreal. She uses techniques including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, and video. Themes of surveillance and security, displacement and migration, borders and security are the focal point of her work. She uses her art to tell stories.
“We are so used to going to an exhibition and having a set beginning and end, where every gesture has been clarified and every mark has been noted,” Waheed told the Financial Times. “But that’s not as important to me as an affective experience.”
Major institutions around the world display Waheed’s works in their permanent collections. The National Gallery of Canada, London’s British Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art are among them.
Waheed received the 2022 Mid-Career Award for Outstanding Achievement as an Artist from the Hnatyshyn Foundation. She was also a 2016 finalist for the Sobey Art Award, Canada’s biggest contemporary art award.
Hajra Waheed’s immersive exhibitions
Like sculptor Rosha Yaghmai, Waheed’s work challenges expectations. Sea Change is a long-term project – the artist describes it as a visual novel – that began in 2011. The work encompasses 9 chapters, following 9 characters in their personal journeys of migration and getting lost.
Sea Change, Chapter 1, Character 1, In the Rough, follows “a geologist in search of quartz crystal.” Waheed took inspiration from a story on the news about 166 pilgrims who disappeared on the way to Mecca from Kolkata.
An intricate meditation, Waheed has used video, painting, photography, objects, and more to expand Sea Change. In a 2016 exhibition, fragments spanned multiple rooms as the viewer investigated clues of the character’s quest.
“I want people to feel they are looking both into and out of a microscope,” said Waheed.
Hum (2020) is an immersive 16-channel sound installation. The musical composition takes hummed songs of resistance from the Southern, Central, and Western regions of Asia and Africa. Hum translates to “We” in Urdu – a nod to international movements against state oppression and authoritarianism.
“[Humming is] often overlooked as a medium, as a meditation, as a phenomenon, and language,” Waheed explained to The Contemporary Journal. “It’s an utterance we’re all capable of making when our lips have been sealed shut.
Hajra Waheed’s childhood shapes her work
Waheed grew up within the gated compound of Saudi ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company) in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Her family spent 22 years there for her father’s work as a geologist.
“For years, Dhahran has been protected by US and Saudi Airbases, an in-compound security force, the CIA and Saudi Secret Service with strict regulations around access and the civilian use of photographic/video equipment,” Waheed told The White Review. “This kind of secrecy and isolation became the very undercurrents that as a child influenced my play, the interests I gravitated towards and the questions I asked.”
“These early experiences have continued to guide major themes in my work, from surveillance, to the dehumanisation of the other to the examination of our current vertical occupation.”
At 14, Waheed enrolled in an all-girls boarding school in rural upstate New York. She later pursued a BFA in painting from the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 2002. By 2011 Waheed obtained both her master’s and a PhD in International & Comparative Education from Montreal’s McGill University.
Hajra Waheed awarded grants by Warhol Foundation, NEA
Waheed’s first major solo exhibition in the US will be with The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The exhibition will be open between September 8 2023 – February 12 2024. Both the Andy Warhol Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts have awarded her generous grants towards the project.
The artist is one of 50 spring 2022 Warhol Foundation grantees, receiving $75,000. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded Waheed $45,000. The exhibition will feature both new and existing works.
“The Warhol Foundation is pleased to support the first major solo exhibition of Hajra Waheed, whose work does the important job of catalyzing conversations that connect global forms of resistance to a future of radical human interdependence and flourishing,” said Warhol Foundation Program Director Rachel Bers.
The focal point of the exhibition will be Waheed’s 2020 work Hum. She will complement the installation with new work commissioned for the St. Louis museum. This exhibition plans to include video, sculpture, and drawing to explore connection, community, and unity across borders.
“This generous funding will enable her to create a new body of work and connect with St. Louis audiences for the very first time, in a space uniquely designed for engagement and discovery,” stated the museum’s Executive Director Lisa Melandri.
