Hollybush Gardens is pleased to present Foragers (2022), a new film by Jumana Manna, marking her first solo exhibition in the main gallery. Manna’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, filmmaking, and writing, exploring the paradoxical effects of preservation practices in agriculture, archaeology and law. Foragers continues Manna’s examination of how such practices intersect with colonial power structures, exploring the criminalisation of Palestinian herb foraging practices. This film blends documentary, fiction, and archival footage primarily from Jerusalem and the Galilee region of Palestine/Israel, where Manna grew up and continues to shoot many of her films.
The work complements Manna’s previous film Wild Relatives (2018), which explored the politics of seed banking in Syria, Lebanon, and Norway. Foragers carries these concerns of human-plant relations and their governance into the practice of foraging; a historical tradition that continues to be part of the seasonal cuisine in Palestine. Foraging ‘akkoub and za’atar has been criminalised by the Israeli government under the guise of conservation efforts, resulting in heavy fines, trials, and prison sentences for Arabs who are caught gathering these plants. Both intimate and absurdist in tone, Manna’s investigatory and poetic work traces the cultural significance of this tradition and its politicised legislation.
Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between Palestinian foragers and the Israeli nature patrol to the forager’s defence court rooms, this work questions the politics of extinction: who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on. Foragers carefully illustrates the importance of these food sources as sustenance and cultural symbol for people whose political autonomy, rights, and land have been under attack for nearly a century. Contextualised against a backdrop of ecological and economic precarity, Manna continues her ongoing inquiry into the paradoxes of maintaining life or records of disappearing practices when enacted by the governing bodies that are at the root of the erasure themselves. Carefully highlighting the multiplicity of life forms that exist between and beyond competing forces, she demonstrates the precarity and beauty in individual and collective resistance and continuity.
Jumana Manna (b. 1987) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and preservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration.
In September 2022, Manna presented a major solo exhibition, Break, Take, Erase, Tally, at MoMA PS1, New York on view until April 2023. Recent solo exhibitions include Jumana Manna / MATRIX 278, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco; Sketch and Bread, Balade Berlin-Charlottenburg, Villa Oppenheim, Berlin; Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; Setting of Noon, Hollybush Gardens, London (all 2021); Wild Relatives, Tensta Kunsthall, Sweden (2020); Jumana Manna, Tabakalera, San Sebastian, Spain (2019); Wild Relatives, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2018); 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 Kunsthall, Sweden (2016); A Magical Substance Flows Into Me, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); and Menace of Origins, SculptureCenter, New York (2014). She has participated in numerous significant group exhibitions, including Forest: Wake This Ground, Arnolfini, Bristol; Manifesta 14, Pristina, Kosovo; FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (all 2022); Toronto Biennial of Art (2022; 2019); 11th Taipei Biennial (2018); Nordic Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); Liverpool Biennial (2016) and Marrakech Biennale 6 (2016).
Manna’s films have been shown at multiple film festivals around the world. Her work is held in significant public and private collections internationally, including MoMA, New York; MCA Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Carre d’art, Nîmes, France; National Museum of Norway, Oslo; and Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE.
