Biography
Hajra Waheed’s multidisciplinary practice ranges from interactive installations to collage, video, sound and sculpture. Prompted by news accounts and extensive research, Waheed uses complex narrative structures to explore issues surrounding covert power, mass surveillance, cultural distortion and the traumas and alienation of subjects displaced through mass migration. Characterized by a distinct visual language and unique poetic approach, her works use the ordinary as a means to convey the profound, and landscape as a medium to transpose human struggle and a radical politics of resistance and resilience.
Waheed’s work been shown in exhibitions worldwide, including Hum, Portikus, Frankfurt (2020); Globale Resistance, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Lahore Biennial 02, Pakistan (2020); Pushing Paper: Contemporary Drawing from 1970 to Now, British Museum, London (2019); Hold Everything Dear, The Power Plant, Toronto (2019); 57th Venice Biennale (2017); 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016); The Cyphers, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2016) and Still Against the Sky, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2015).
Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the British Museum, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Burger Collection, Hong Kong and Devi Art Foundation, Delhi.
She received the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding achievement as a Canadian mid-career visual artist (2014) and was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2016).
Born in 1980 in Calgary, Canada, she lives and works in Montreal.
