COLLECTIVE HAJRA COSMOLOGIES WAHEED
It is survival as revival, resistance as reclamation, resilience as transformation.
– The Spiral
You step into the darkness. You look up, and through the layers of leaves, in the night sky, there is light. As you begin to move, a voice speaks. “The spiral is much more than just a form… It expands and contracts, increases and decreases… it is the form of smoke entering the air…” She finds the form in nature, and in ourselves. “The form of embryos and the cylindrical helices of our umbilical cords that tether mother to child.” The outlines of silhouetted leaves change above you. “It reminds us that just as everything comes together, everything falls apart again…” She evokes its deeper significations. “It is a way of seeing… It is about community / collaboration / attaching and being attached… Change, is rarely a straightforward line.” Is she talking to you, or are these your own thoughts?
The motion of this seven-minute filmic journey through the dark is a mysterious one. Initially the words might seem to echo Rebecca Solnit’s reflection on walking as the “state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned” but the visual motion is a smooth one, without acceleration or resistance, a voyage more of mind or metaphor rather than body and earth. Hajra Waheed debuted this poem-video (2019) in September 2019 at her solo exhibition “Hold Everything Dear” at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, where more than 100 works—spanning collages to ceramics, etchings to cyanotypes on fabric—suggested that she was tracing new lines of flight within her practice, connecting people and places across time in a process that she describes in as one originating in “the awareness of the self and the expansion of
