Rana Hajjar is a Canadian architect and self-taught artist of Palestinian and Lebanese descent. Her art practice focuses on the exploration and documentation of personal narratives, oral memories, confessions and nostalgia to create rich tapestries of textures using language, art, photography and architecture.
While Rana’s work is influenced by architectural frameworks and the desire to understand form and emotional spaces, her family’s journey from Palestine to Lebanon the United Arab Emirates and finally to Canada has her exploring the meaning of be-longing/longing and identity, cross cultural migrations and borders.
As a secular female artist, Rana treaded with trepidation into the field of Arabic script which is traditionally reserved for religious scripture and male calligraphers. She found that using it allowed her to reclaim her colonized mind from the foreign languages imposed on her since birth.
What started as chaotic free association and endless iterations, mutations and scrawlings, transcended to become a meditative exercise on the plasticity of the Arabic script and the creation of abstractions with their own narratives, confessions and nostalgia. These deconstructions and meandering experiments in art now reveal the transient, sensual, borderless, and sometimes even musical journey of Rana as an artist.
Rana lives in Montreal, Canada.