Jumana Manna: Break, Take, Erase, Tally

Land features centrally in Manna’s interdisciplinary work, which uses a range of narrative methods and sculptural forms to visualize the slow violence of industrial agriculture, neoliberal economic policy, and policing. Bearing witness to the ongoing tensions between agrarian histories and state bureaucracies, her practice traces the flows of human and plant life across political and legal boundaries.

Manna’s film Wild Relatives (2018) follows the rebuilding of a seed bank after the Syrian war forced its relocation from Aleppo, via the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, to neighboring Lebanon. In Foragers (2022), Manna moves between fiction and documentary to chronicle the confrontations between Palestinian pickers of the wild-growing herbs ’akkoub and za’atar and the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority, which has classified these plants as endangered. The foragers’ refusal and the punishments they face, from large fines to potential jail time, at times take on an absurdist and comical tone that raises key questions around the politics of extinction—namely who determines what gets to live on and how.

Break, Take, Erase, Tally brings together nearly 20 works and presents Foragers and Wild Relatives in conversation with a new installation of sculptures that take inspiration from the fragmented remains of khabyas, traditional and now-obsolete structures for grain storage in the Levant. These architectural and biomorphic objects are arrayed on plinths that borrow materials found in urban industrial infrastructures, from vaults to drainage systems. They also echo the grid pattern of the Wexner Center’s architecture, engaging the museum’s role as a site of preservation and control.

Foragers will be screening in the gallery at the following times:

11:15 AM, 12:25 PM, 1:35 PM, 2:45 PM, and 3:55 PM daily 
and at 5:05 PM and 6:15 PM on Thursdays only