Jumana Manna

Your Time Passes And Mine Has No Ends, 2025

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work explores the articulations of power through the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through cinema, abstract sculpture, and collage, Manna addresses how performing bodies, material fragments, and landscapes desire and narrate pasts, presents, and futures that persist and resist the violences imposed upon them. Her recent work considers the paradoxes of conservation—how systems intended to protect can also regulate, extract, or suppress—attending to the persistence of life and resistance within conditions of control. Manna’s work in Sonsbeek comprises a series of banners bearing quotations from texts written by Palestinian political prisoners alongside references drawn from the history of the commons and collective rituals in Palestine. Up until the Nakba, festivities called mawasim (Arabic for the seasons) took place, with the two most prominent being Nabi Musa (a week-long procession and encampment between Jerusalem and Jericho) and Nabi Rubin (a month-long festival on the coast between Gaza and Jaffa). Combining literary and archival citations, the installation enacts the memory of these pre-colonial, liberatory celebrations seen in contact with Israel’s racialized incarceration system. The banners insist on continuity across rupture, foregrounding a radical spirit of defiance that persists within conditions of confinement, where language becomes both a carrier of memory and a site of resistance. Memory is then translated from conditions of captivity into a language that is publicly visible, carried, and encoded within each unique banner that themselves perform a movement from the individual to the collective.

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