Ensemble

Jumana Manna is a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker whose work explores the intersection of history, politics, and material culture, with a particular focus on the body, land, and the entanglements of power. Working across moving images, sculpture, and installation, Manna’s practice is marked by a poetic and rigorous inquiry into how forms of persistence and resistance are embedded in both objects and living systems.

Working between Jerusalem and Berlin, Manna critically reframes preservation outside its historically institutionalized frameworks across architecture, agriculture and law, highlighting everyday practices of care and communion. Combining archival research, ethnographic observation, and personal narrative, her work is grounded in a research-driven process that centers on re-stagings of quotidian life, creating an archive from below that finds strength, humor and liveliness amidst ruination.

Manna’s practice resists categorization, embracing ambiguity, irony, and vulnerability as tools of critique. Rather than offering didactic statements, her works unfold slowly—foregrounding the complexity of lived experience and the layered textures of cultural mutation and survival. In both content and form, she constructs spaces where memory, fiction, and political urgency coexist.

Her installation Your Time Passes And Mine Has No Ends includes handcrafted banner-flags embroidered with quotations from contemporary Palestinian political prisoners, such as Walid Daqaqa and Khaleda Jarrar, hoisted between metal balcony-like structures. The banners’ compositions and colors draw on the history of the mawasim—traditional festive mass celebrations performed through prayer, song, and dance held across the Arab world, and historically in Palestine, where such communal assemblies were ruptured by the Nakba.

Grounded in the close study of colonial archival documents and literary accounts of the mawasim, Manna revives the historical banner as a communal and liberatory practice, superimposing it with the present-day writings of Palestinian political prisoners that refuse the silencing and fracturing aims of their jailers. Your Time Passes And Mine Has No Ends attends to a radical spirit of defiance in Palestinian history. Through the gesture of activating both collective and intimate practices—each carrying within them modes of resilience against erasure—Manna inscribes the experience of isolation onto the collective body, linking carceral confinement to public memory.

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we refuse_d is produced by Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, on the occasion of their 15th anniversary, and presented in partnership with M HKA.
Curated by Nadia Radwan and Vasif Kortun.