Hajra Waheed @mor charpentier
September 2, 2021
Join us on Saturday September 4th for the opening of ???????? ?? ??????? by Hajra Waheed. In her first all-painting show, Waheed features tightly scaled works on paper and a series of hand-bound artist books. In her earlier processes of working in the “exploding book form,” typically bound materials were de-paginated, separated and recombined; here, Waheed turns to the accordion form, over a dozen books that unfold, extend and are meant to be read as a continuously flowing river. Recurring images within her works, be they sky, sea or earth, acknowledge a universal presence, one in defiance of our individual circumstances. This incorporation of recognizable but nonrepresentational imagery is critical to Waheed’s way of working: she uses abstraction to understand something about the mechanics of seeing, to defamiliarize what seems obvious and to project what is yet to come. For Waheed, painting inherently holds within it infinite possibilities, with her return to it always remaining the same: as a practice of joy and that of liberation.