Jumana Manna

Jumana Manna, a versatile visual artist, creates across various mediums, including installation art and film.

Biography of Jumana Manna

Jumana Manna was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1987. She lived in Jerusalem, Israel, and Oslo, Norway.

In 2006, she received a BA from the Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Later, the artist obtained a BA from the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo (2009). In 2011, Manna completed her studies in Aesthetics and Politics at CalArts in Los Angeles, receiving an MA. 

During her artistic career, Jumana Manna has received several awards, including the A.M. Qattan Foundations' Young Palestinian Artist Award (2012), the Sandefjord Kunstpris (2015), the Films on Art Award at the Wroclaw Film Festival (2016), The Max Pechstein Advancement Award (2021), and the Green Dox Prize at the Dokufest in Prizren, Kosovo (2022), among others.

Her solo exhibitions have been held at various galleries and museums worldwide, including Wexner Centre for the Arts in Ohio, Hollybush Gardens in London, MoMA PS1 in New York, The Island Club in Limassol, Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, and many others.

Jumana Manna's works have been featured in numerous group shows and festivals, such as Manifesta 14 (2022), FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial (2022), Taipei Biennial (2023 and 2018), the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), Marrakech Biennale 6 (2016), among others. 

Currently, the artist lives and works in Berlin, Germany. 

Jumana Manna's Famous Works

Manna's work investigates the expression of power, with a focus on the body, land, and materiality, examining their connections to colonial legacies and historical contexts. Notable pieces include "Window with Ledge" (2018), the film "Wild Relatives" (2018), "Master" (2019), "Bread Series (Fence)" (2021), "Sandwich (Cache Series)" (2022), the film "Foragers" (2022), and many more.

In her "Cache" series, the artist creates anthropomorphic interpretations of khabyas. These khabyas, integral to rural Levantine architecture, were traditional seed storage chambers embedded within homes to safeguard grains for planting and annual use.

He video work "Foragers" (2022) portrays the complexities of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with a blend of wry humor and a contemplative rhythm. Filmed in the Golan Heights, Galilee, and Jerusalem, the work combines fiction, documentary, and archival footage to explore the effects of Israeli nature protection laws on these traditional practices.

Jumana Manna's Art Style

A multidisciplinary visual artist, Manna creates across various mediums, including installation art and film. Her work investigates the articulation of power by focusing on the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial legacies and historical contexts.

Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna addresses the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly in architecture, agriculture, and law. Her practice examines the tension between modernist traditions of categorization and conservation and the unpredictability of decay, life, and regeneration.