#152: Jumana Manna

Friday, 13 June 2025, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
admission free and open to the public

Jumana Manna is a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores the articulations of power through the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Moving between the seemingly divergent media of cinema, abstract sculptures, and collage, Manna addresses how performing bodies, material fragments, and landscapes both desire and narrate pasts, presents, futures that persist and resist the violences imposed upon them. Her early films employed strategies of historical and biographical reenactment to examine acts of ideological narration and constructions of masculinity, often employing satire as a critical device. More recently, her work has dealt with the paradoxes of preservation – particularly with regards to land practices and the law – probing the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and regeneration. Manna holds an MA in aesthetics and politics at the California Institute of the Arts and a BA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her rigorous research and physical immersion in the act of making extend across her films, installations, and sculptures. Manna lives in Jerusalem and Berlin.

Jumana Manna, who is present, shows:

The Umpire Whispers, 2010, 15:00 min
The Umpire Whispers is an exploration of the intimacy that arises between a swimming coach and his athlete. In the film, Manna returns to meet her coach five years after quitting competitive swimming and asks to recreate a recurring situation from her teenage years, in which he gives her a massage and she massages him in return. Investigating the boundaries and power dynamics of this relationship, the film delves into the complex nature of pain and care involved in this somatic gesture.

BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION, 2010, 21:00 min
A portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, as manifested in gyms, body shops and hair dressing parlors. Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION uses visual collage and the musical soundtrack as ironic commentary. Anger’s subjects — leather-clad bikers—serve as a counterpoint to the culture Manna attempts to portray: the stereotyped male “thug” culture in Palestine. Close-up fragments construct an eroticised and parodic montage of bodies, cars and places, interwoven by snippets of dialogue and a monologue about the art of a car wash. Simultaneously psychologizing the characters and seduced by them, Manna finds herself in a double bind similar to the conflicted desire that animates her protagonist as he drifts from abject rants to declamations of heroic poetry and unashamed self-praise.

A Sketch of Manners (Alfred Roch’s Last Masquerade), 2013, co-scripted with Norman M. Klein, 12:00 min
Alfred Roch, member of the Palestinian National League, is a politician with a bohemian panache. In 1942, at the height of WWII, he throws what will turn out to be the last masquerade in Palestine. Inspired by an archival photograph, A Sketch of Manners (Alfred Roch’s Last Masquerade) recreates an unconventional bon vivant aspect of Palestinian urban life before 1948. Posing silently for a group photo, the unmasked and melancholic pierrots accidentally personify the premonition of an uncertain future.

The Goodness Regime, 2013 Jumana Manna and Sille Storihle, 21:00 min
The Goodness Regime is a creative documentary exploring the myths and images that have enabled an understanding of Norway as a nation of peace and benevolence. The binding element is a series of enactments by children that recount the myths, historical events and cultural personas that have propelled the image of Norway as a peace nation. These stagings are interwoven with archival footage, political speeches and voice-overs from Hollywood films describing the quintessential Norway. In a satirical deconstruction of the Goodness Regime that permeates Norwegian society, the film explores the moral dilemmas embedded within the history of one of the wealthiest nations on earth.

Jumana Manna (b. 1987) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her solo exhibitions include Break, Take, Erase, Tally (touring), Rialto6 Lisbon, Kunsthall Stavanger, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; MoMA PS1, New York (2022–2024); Preservation Paradox, Matadero Madrid (2022); Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2021); Wild Relatives, at Tensta Konsthall, Sweden (2020); 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 Kunsthall, Sweden (2016) and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); and Menace of Origins, SculptureCenter, New York (2014).

She has participated in numerous significant group exhibitions and festivals, including ALOHA NŌ, Hawai’i Triennial 2025; Accumulation, On Collecting, Growth and Excess, Migros Museum, Zurich; Seeds: Containers of a World to Come, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Missouri, USA; Unsettled Earth, Spore Initiative, Berlin (all 2025); The Irreplaceable Human, Louisiana Museum, Denmark; Manif d’Art – La biennale de Québec; Flaherty Film Seminar, Thailand (all 2024); 13th Taipei Biennial, Small World, Taipei; In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, Kuchi-Muziris Biennale, India; Being as Communion, Thessaloniki Biennial 8, Greece (all 2023); Vision du Reel, Switzerland; IDFA, Amsterdam; Manifesta 14, Prishtina, Kosovo (all 2022); Toronto Biennial of Art (2022; 2019); The Space Between Classrooms, Swiss Institute, New York (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Critical Zones, ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (both 2020); Garden of Earthly Delights, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019); Nordic Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale ( 2017); Liverpool Biennial; Marrakech Biennale 6 (both 2016); 54th and 56th Vienna International Film Festivals (2016; 2018); 66th and 68th Berlinale (2016 and 2018); and CPH:DOX, Copenhagen (2023; 2018), where Wild Relatives (2018) won the new visions award. Manna was awarded the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts (2017), the Environmental Award at Sheffield Doc Fest ( 2018), and the Chicken & Egg Award for women and gender-expansive documentary filmmakers (2024). Manna is currently working on a large-scale public art commission to be unveiled in 2026 in Oslo.

pic: A Sketch of Manners (Alfred Roch’s Last Masquerade), 2013, 12:00 min film still © Jumana Manna. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London.