Jumana Manna: Broken, Taken, Erased, Tallied

Rialto6, Lisbon, 18 October 2024 – 24 January 2025

review by Henry Broome

Now back home in London, the memory of Jumana Mannaʼs exhibition feels distant and yet something of it hasnʼt finished, has remained since October when I visited Lisbon. “Since October”. Two words that now trigger thousands of horrific images of Gaza, of the brutalised bodies that flash up every time you open social media. “Since October”, a phrase that has been used to explain away Israelʼs crimes against humanity, a colonial framing that implies that Palestinians deserve complete erasure, that the 45,000 civilians Israel has killed in Gaza was simply retribution for the Hamas attack, that the brutal Israeli occupation hasn’t been going on for 75 years, since the 1948 Nakba (Arabic for “Catastrophe”), when Israel forcibly displaced 750,000 Palestinians. How do you even mark time when history has never stopped since then, when it drives forward flattening everything in its path, when the violence is unrelentingly continuous?

On the way to the gallery, walking on foot, I came across a mural for Palestine which had been defaced. Someone had thrown water balloons full of paint stripper at it. The words “Palestina Viva” splattered across the surface, paint streaking down. I knew it was only a mural but there seemed to be violent intent in this act of vandalism. I couldnʼt help but think of the images of the Palestinian children covered in burns. There is a similar relationship between real violence and symbolic or implied violence in Mannaʼs work. The artistʼs Rialto6 exhibition has a work titled Old Bread International II (2023). There are piles of moulding bread, uncannily rendered in ceramic, laid out on metal grates – plentiful food gone to waste – calling to mind the cruel excesses of capitalism as well as the ongoing famine in Gaza. I recall the heartbreaking images of Palestinian children collecting spoiled flour from the ground. I think of the Flour Massacre of 29 February 2024, when the Israeli army fired on crowds of starved Palestinians, gathered to collect flour in Gaza City, killing at least 112 people and injuring some 760, part of a pattern of Israeli military attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking to access urgently needed food aid.

“Palestina Viva”mural, Lisbon. Text at top reads: “Reconhecer o Estado Palestiniano / Sançōes a Israel / Punir os Crimes de Guerra” (Recognise the Palestinian State / Sanctions on Israel / Punish War Crimes). Photo: Henry Broome, October 2024.

In the gallery, the ceramic bread is broken up. It looks like rotting dismembered flesh. Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, Rector of Glasgow University, is a British-Palestinian war surgeon who has been providing medical support in Gaza before and since the genocide began there in 2023. He has written about how Israel strategically uses weapons that fragment their victimsʼ bodies to prevent Palestinians from being able to grieve and bury their killed loved ones, extending the brutality of death for survivors, with no possibility of ever overcoming the loss. Writing shortly after Mannaʼs show opened, Abu-Sittah said, “The difference between a war and a genocide is that the former destroys the present in order to alter the future whereas a genocide destroys the past and the present in order to prevent the future from happening. […] Israel’s dismemberment of the dead Palestinian body into unburyable ashlaa’ [scattered body parts and dismembered flesh and bones] is part of preventing such a future.” In the objectsʼ banal everyday-ness, Mannaʼs Old Bread International II captures the way settler colonialism becomes an unending torture, the way it lays claims to past, present and future, every wish, every prayer.

Jumana Manna, Cache, 2019. Installation shot of Jumana Manna: Broken, Taken, Erased, Tallied at Rialto6, Lisbon. Image: Rialto6.

On view in the central space, there is a work titled Cache (2019). There are ceramic containers, their shape inspired by the remains of khabyas, structures that were used for grain storage, built into rural homes in the Levant, but became obsolete after the invention of refrigerators. They are stacked up, one on top of each other, on metal shelving units, not it seems to be seen, shared with a public audience, but to be stored, to be inventoried, evoking the way Israel colonises and commoditises Palestinian culture, how Palestiniansʼ collective past is being “Broken, Taken, Erased, Tallied”, to quote the exhibitionʼs title. Between 1967 and 1992 Israel removed an estimated 200,000 artefacts from the occupied Palestinian territory annually, with approximately 120,000 removed each year between 1995-2013. For decades, Israel has been systematically expropriating and destroying tangible and intangible Palestinian cultural heritage and cultural property. This process of cultural erasure became much worse when Israel began its genocidal assault on Gaza last year. As documented by the group Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, between October 2023 and January 2024, the Israeli army destroyed 12 libraries, the Al-Israa University Library reduced to rubble by controlled detonation. The Central Archives of Gaza City was completely destroyed by direct shelling, erasing 150 years of records on Gaza’s history. These attacks by Israel are targetted and intentional, because if a people have no culture they can have no claim to their land, they have no civilisation, no humanity and then their lives are worth nothing. To outward appearances, the tone of Mannaʼs work seems wholly uninvested with emotion, they seem to state the way things are as a matter of fact, but the objects resist, they point beyond themselves, beyond the white cube, revealing the dehumanising violence of the colonial logic. There is some ineffable power of khabyas that does not fade with time, that cannot be counted or broken.

Jumana Manna, Foragers, (video still), 64 min, 2022. Image permission: Jumana Manna.

The exhibition also includes Mannaʼs 2022 film Foragers. Set across the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it depicts Palestinians struggling against the racist laws that prevent them from foraging for wild herbs and vegetables. The film opens with aerial footage of a forager shot from a drone, hovering threateningly overhead, adjusting to its targetʼs every movement. Is the drone armed? Is the manʼs life in danger? The Israeli military first began using drones in Gaza in 2000 and already by 2014 they had led to the murder of hundreds of Palestinian civilians and injured thousands more. Israel also used armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) against Palestinians in the West Bank during the Second Intifada (2000-2005). Post-2005 in the West Bank, the attack drones were replaced by smaller unarmed reconnaissance drones, used intermittently to patrol protests, enforce home demolitions and surveil closed military zones, buzzing overhead, psychologically tormenting the Palestinian population, presenting an unstoppable threat of death and destruction. Mannaʼs film combines fiction, documentary and archive footage; itʼs hard to tell what is real and what is not. There is a sense of an absurd unreality to the Israeli occupation. A Palestinian man with multiple offences of picking akkoub (an edible, thistle-like plant) is given the choice between 30 days jail or a fine of 6,000 shekels (around £1,300). “To hell with it”, he responds, refusing to choose, to validate a law that denies Palestinians that same rights and freedoms as Israelis. Resistance runs throughout the film. Two Palestinian foragers film an Israeli Nature and Parks officer while he issues them with a fine, using sousveillance to watch the occupier, turning the colonial systems of monitoring and control back in on itself in a counter image to the earlier drone shots. “Viva viva Palestina”, one of them shouts, defiant in the face of persecution. In the finale, crimson lights flash across the fields at night, evoking scenes of war and bloodshed. It stops, then dawn brings a new day. There are flocks of birds soaring high in the blue sky, symbolising a future free from subjugation for Palestine, an insistence from Manna that there can be radical breaks with the past, that liberation comes from struggle as sure as day follows night. Mannaʼs work breaks the sense of unending despair and provides hope and clarity, reclaiming the promise of tomorrow.