Hajra Waheed
Hold Everything Dear
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto

Hajra Waheed’s “Hold Everything Dear” at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, lived up to its prodigious name in a sensitive and delicate way. The exhibition was an intrepid aesthetic response to the most urgent of our contemporary political and ecological concerns. Essayistic in tenor—like critic John Berger’s 2007 collection of writings, from which the show borrowed its title—“Hold Everything Dear” presented a redemptive visage of a world in crisis.

Traversing familiar themes of environmental ruin, technological surveillance, and migration, Waheed appeared attuned to all that denotes existence as pained under the aegis of modernity. The show initially appeared sparse in the Power Plant’s cavernous space, though on closer examination one found a rigorous if understated display of media, techniques, and aesthetic choices that showcased Waheed’s thematic and technical breadth. Trained in drawing and photography, Waheed moved effortlessly here between media. Take, for instance, the dialogue between Flight in Form (2019), abstract tangles of wire mapping out aerial routes of surveillance planes, and the figurative miniature ceramic sculptures of Walls, Ladders and Roads (2019); the two projects signify the profound tenuousness and violence of cross-border travel that is so tightly monitored and controlled by the state, attending to the present-day global migrant crisis.