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 to 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, and translation. Together, these elements work to ground diasporic longing and nourishment through mimetic gestures, which are at once solid and fleeting.

Photos courtesy of the artist.