Dima Hajjar

Biography

Dima Hajjar
Born in Beirut in 1968, Dima Hajjar has obtained her degree with honor mention from the Lebanese American University in 1995. Since her first solo exhibition in 1999 at the Maraya-Reflets d’Art Gallery, she was recognized as “a painter of high standard: she knew how to create a world of her own, with a personal graphic style and a personal palette. From now on, we cannot but recognize her signature […] with a remarkable command and maturity in her first exhibition” (Joseph Tarrab). This was confirmed in her second solo exhibition at Espace SD, Beirut, 2004, unanimously acclaimed by art critics as a step foreword in an original approach.
Her artwork has been honored at the occasion of different competitions and artistic manifestations such as the competition Harvest (Beirut 1995), and in 2000 “The International Millennium Painting Competition” that was held in London, Stockholm, and New York. She was offered the “Laurier d’honneur” by the Lebanese State and won in 2001 a silver medal at “The IVth Games of la Francophonie” held at the National Gallery of Canada (MBAC). In 2003 she has been awarded the prize of the jury at the “XXIVth Salon d’Automne” of Sursock Museum. Dima Hajjar has also participated in many collective exhibitions such as the “Xe Festival Francophonie Métissée” (Wallonia-Brussels Center, Paris), and the “Couleurs de la Francophonie” an international itinerant exhibition held at the Gallery Kiron in Paris, then as part of “Dak’Art 2002” (Contemporary African Art Biennial), and finally at the Gallery Africrea in Cameroon. In 2004, she took part in the exhibition “Lebanon, the Artist’s View II” at Cork Street Galleries in London. She also represented Lebanon at “The 23rd Alexandria Biennial for Mediterranean Countries”, Museum of Fine Arts, Alexandria, Egypt (2005). More recently, she took part in the “Lebanese Plastic Art Exhibition”, a collective exhibition organized by the Lebanese Cultural Ministry at the UNESCO Palace in Alger (2007). Dima Hajjar has also represented Lebanon during different residencies of Francophone artists such as Khan El-Franj (Saïda) and the Esplanade of the Canadian Museum of Civilisations (Ottawa-Hull)


Structures of confinement
I get my ideas usually from urban and personal life. Observations, photographs, memories, drawings, and perhaps pieces of unresolved works start confronting each other on a canvas. Exploring the possibilities of signs and the space animated by them, I start to live my work along with my daily life as a series of events. At this stage, everything is subject to radical changes, including the quadrilateral surface occupied by plastic and graphic signs. Sometimes I adjoin another surface or another volume, and sometimes the work cannot be “solved” until it develops into a multimedia one. Working on a new project, I scarcely ever know what I am about to do until the story is told. Addressing the relation to nature (Winter Tree’s series), and culture (Technophobia series), my work investigates the issue of decontextualization in the simple fact of “quoting” visual elements from nature or technology in social context. Are we seeing the same thing? Are we speaking the same (visual) language? “What kind of spatial and temporal accommodation is needed for two visions to coincide, especially when, in the simple fact of seeing and being seen, little and grand narratives come to interfere?” (Jacques Aswad).

Dima Hajjar