Artist: Jumana Manna
Exhibition title: Break, Take, Erase, Tally
Curated by: Hanne Mugaas and Heather Jones
Organized with: Ruba Katrib, MoMA PS1
Venue: Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway
Date: March 7 – August 25, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunsthall Stavanger
Note: Exhibition floor plan is available here
Kunsthall Stavanger is proud to announce Break, Take, Erase, Tally by Palestinian artist Jumana Manna, organized in partnership with MoMA PS1.
This major exhibition charts the artist’s multidisciplinary practice, which explores the paradoxical effects of preservation practices in agriculture, science, and the law. The exhibition at Kunsthall Stavanger brings together for the first time in Norway nearly 20 works including two recent films and a series of new and existing sculptures.
Manna’s work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna investigates the relationships between humans, land, and the colonial power structures that act upon them. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration.
Break, Take, Erase, Tally at Kunsthall Stavanger includes film and sculpture installations that together question “not whether to preserve, but who gets to decide what lives on and how.” The film Wild Relatives exemplifies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to underscore the scientific limitations in recovering the loss of biological life, in all of its forms. The work visualizes the slow violence of industrial agriculture while asking poignant questions about what kind of future is possible in a precarious present. In her new film Foragers, Manna moves between documentary and fiction to chronicle confrontations between Palestinian pickers of wild growing herbs, and the Israeli Nature Protection Authority, which has deemed the plants endangered. The foragers’ refusal and the punishments they face, from large fines and potential jail time, at times takes on an absurdist and comical tone that raises key questions around the politics of extinction.
The exhibition also features a new large-scale installation of the Cache series. The anthropomorphic ceramic sculptures take inspiration from the fragmented remains of khabyas, traditional and now obsolete structures for grain storage in the Levant. The sculptures are placed in dialogue with the artist’s signature industrial plinth assemblages, which borrow materials found in the urban environment—from construction sites to drainage systems.
The works presented in Break, Take, Erase, Tally at Kunsthall Stavanger explore the land and its rhythms as the basis for ways of life that can also serve to resist, evade, and transform hegemonic power structures. Taken together, the works not only demand that we examine the powers at play in our daily lives, but show us how we might envision a different landscape inspired by resilience and relation.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jumana Manna (1987) is a Palestinian visual artist. Born in the United States, she lived in Jerusalem and Oslo, and now resides in Berlin. Manna’s major solo exhibition Break, Take, Erase, Tally was on view at Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, from August 25 – December 30, 2023, following its first iteration at MoMA PS1 in September 22, 2022 – April 17, 2023. Recent solo exhibitions include Foragers, Hollybush Gardens, London (2022), Jumana Manna / MATRIX 278, Berkeley museum of Art, San Francisco; Sketch and Bread, Balade Berlin-Charlottenburg, Villa Oppenheim, Berlin; Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (all 2021); Wild Relatives, Tensta Konsthall, Sweden (2020); Jumana Manna, Tabakalera, San Sebastian, Spain (2019); Jumana Manna: A Magical Substance Flows Into Me, Mercer Union, Toronto (2017); Wild Relatives, Jeu de Paume’s Satellite 10 program at MABA and CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2017); A Magical Substance Flows Into Me, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2016); A Magical Substance Flows Into Me; and Menace of Origins, SculptureCenter, New York (2014).
She has participated in numerous significant group exhibitions and festivals, including Alexandria: Past Futures, Bozar, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels; Forest: Wake This Ground, Arnolfini, Bristol; Manifesta 14, Prishtina, Kosovo; FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial (all 2022); Toronto Biennial of Art (2022; 2019); 11th Taipei Biennial (2018); Nordic Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); Liverpool Biennial (2016); Marrakech Biennale 6 (2016); 54th and 56th Vienna International Film Festivals (2016 and 2018); 66th and 68th Berlinale (2016 and 2018); and CPH:DOX, Copenhagen (2018), where Wild Relatives (2018) won the New:Visions award. Manna was awarded the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Palestinian Artist Award in 2012 and the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts in 2017.
Manna’s work is held in significant public and private collections internationally, including MoMA, New York, USA; MCA Chicago, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Carre d’art, Nîmes, FR; CCS Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, US; National Museum of Norway, Oslo, NO; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, IT; Fundacion TBA21, Vienna, AS; and Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE.
Jumana Manna: Break, Take, Erase, Tally is organized in partnership with Ruba Katrib, MoMA PS1 Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. Curators of the exhibition at Kunsthall Stavanger are Hanne Mugaas, Director, and Heather Jones, Curator (Interim).
The exhibition is generously supported by Arts Council Norway, Fritt Ord, Bergesenstiftelsen, and Norske Kunstforeninger.
ABOUT KUNSTHALL STAVANGER
Kunsthall Stavanger is a contemporary art institution in Stavanger, Norway, that serves as a platform for the production, exhibition, and distribution of artworks that are part of a large international discourse. We collaborate with artists and guest curators to develop solo and group exhibitions with the goal of creating transformative experiences and in-depth audience engagement.
