Jumana Manna

Jumana Manna was born in 1987 in Princeton and is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines the ways in which systems of preservation, classification, and control shape relationships between land, bodies, plants, and cultural histories. Working across film, sculpture, installation, and collage, she investigates the political and material consequences of practices developed in the name of conservation, particularly within agriculture, scientific research, and legal systems. Her work is attentive to the tensions between institutional forms of knowledge and the forms of knowledge embedded in everyday practices, local ecologies, and inherited relationships to land. A central concern of Manna’s practice is the relationship between preservation and power. Her works consider how attempts to protect species, seeds, landscapes, and cultural heritage can simultaneously impose systems of categorisation and regulation. Rather than treating preservation as an inherently neutral or positive process, she examines the contradictions that emerge when living environments are subjected to institutional frameworks designed to control, catalogue, or stabilise them. In this context, land becomes both a physical territory and a site in which political, ecological, legal, and historical forces intersect. These questions are particularly evident in her films. *Wild Relatives* (2018) follows the movement of seeds between the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), whose gene bank was relocated from Aleppo to Lebanon during the Syrian war, and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. The film connects contemporary systems of agricultural preservation with the displacement of people, plants, and knowledge, revealing the complex networks through which seeds are stored, transported, researched, and protected. Rather than presenting preservation as a simple safeguard against loss, Manna explores the infrastructures, histories, and political circumstances that determine what is preserved and under whose authority. In *Foragers* (2022), Manna turns to the collection of wild plants in Palestine, focusing on the restrictions imposed on Palestinian foragers by Israeli environmental regulations. Combining documentary and fictional elements, the film follows the practices of gathering plants traditionally used as food and medicine and the conflicts that arise when these practices encounter state legislation. The work examines the relationship between ecological regulation, cultural tradition, territorial control, and everyday forms of resistance, showing how seemingly technical decisions concerning plants and landscapes can have profound social and political consequences. Sculpture provides another important dimension of Manna’s investigation. Her *Cache* series takes inspiration from the *khabyas*, traditional structures once used for storing grain and other agricultural products. These now-obsolete architectural forms become the basis for ceramic sculptures that translate a technology of preservation into contemporary objects. Through their fragmented and transformed forms, the sculptures consider the relationship between architecture, agriculture, material culture, and the changing systems through which food and knowledge are stored. At MoMA PS1, Manna described the *khabyas* as objects that connected architecture and the body, revealing how structures designed for practical purposes can also carry cultural and historical meanings. Across her different media, Manna is interested in material fragments and living processes that resist complete control. Her sculptures, films, and collages often begin with concrete objects, landscapes, plants, or inherited practices, but transform them into forms that remain open to multiple temporalities and interpretations. The physicality of her materials is therefore inseparable from the histories they contain: agricultural structures, seeds, wild plants, bodies, landscapes, and architectural remains become means through which histories of place can be reconstructed and reconsidered. Her practice also challenges the assumption that preservation necessarily means preventing change. Manna draws attention to the paradox that protecting something can sometimes require freezing it within a particular definition, while living systems depend precisely on transformation, adaptation, decay, and regeneration. This tension between conservation and unruliness runs throughout her work, allowing her to question modern systems of scientific and institutional classification while remaining attentive to the resilience of biological and cultural life. Manna has presented her work internationally, including at MoMA PS1 in New York, where *Break, Take, Erase, Tally* was exhibited in 2022–23. The exhibition brought together films, sculptures, and other works examining agricultural practices, territorial histories, and systems of preservation, including new sculptures inspired by traditional grain-storage structures. Across her practice, Manna continues to investigate how land, bodies, plants, and materials carry histories that exceed the systems created to classify and preserve them. Her work ultimately proposes preservation not as a fixed condition, but as a contested process shaped by political authority, ecological change, memory, and the capacity of living systems to persist and transform.