Jumana Manna

In her practice, Jumana Manna probes what she calls the “unruly potential of ruination and decay”, for therein lies an integral part of life and a potential for regeneration. In the body of work comprising Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, the artist fixes her gaze on the microbial passageways of wastewater.

Imagining the journey of fluids through the body, a sewage system en miniature, Manna’s exploration engenders creaturely ceramics that linger, that lurk in the space. They bring to the surface forms that are usually concealed, whether beneath the ground or behind walls.

Invoking pipe forms that have changed little since their advent in antiquity, the figures resemble both body parts and archaeological artefacts. Together they embody an age-old civilisatory impulse to counter contamination, to banish the abject rather than taking it into account or even using it as a creative force.     

Jumana Manna (1987, PS/DE) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her 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 deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture and law. 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.