Jumana Manna
Late Night Strollers

Brief Histories presents Late Night Strollers, a solo exhibition by Jumana Manna, opening Thursday September 15, 2022, and on view through November 12, 2022. The exhibition brings together recent ceramic sculptures, a scaffolding gauze collage, and Blessed Blessed Oblivion (2010), a video portrait of machismo in East Jerusalem as it transpires in barbershops, gyms, and car garages.

Central to this exhibition and the artist’s practice, this early video work sheds light on Manna’s interest in contradiction and improvisation in places where, according to the artist, infrastructure is built to fail. In Blessed Blessed Oblivion, the young protagonist wanders between acts of seduction and vulgarity, as he moves between his own conflicting desires to be both a national hero and a rebellious, unstoppable force. Using montage and music as ironic commentary, Manna proposes the young men’s over-performativity as a response to the political and economic precarity they face.

Whether filmic or sculptural, Manna’s work reveals an interest in the ways that bodies, landscapes, and objects mutate under duress, taking on unexpected forms and performances as an assertion of life and continuity. Manna puts these inquiries in relation to the sensorial, constantly examining how material ruination and psychological weight become embodied and felt. The new body of sculptures on view move between the worlds of sewage, digestion, and building sites. At the center is Late Night Stroller (2021) from the limbpipe series that simulates both bodily limbs and the drainage tubing used from ancient times until today. Normally hidden behind walls and under pavements, moving away unwanted sights and smells, it appears at the site of the exhibition as an uncanny conduit. Similarly, Theory of an Unfinished Building (River) (2022) is a large-scale collage sewn from multi-colored pieces of scaffolding gauzes cut off from construction sites; ‘dust catchers’ that wrap around building facades as they undergo construction to trap airborne contaminants. Old Bread (Depositions) (2022), take inspiration from both ancient votive deposits made for fertility goddesses and uneaten stale bread left out on the street. As offerings of sorts, these leftovers point to the remedial effort to counter the anxiety induced by refuse and uneaten food, and the rituals tied to bread as a sign of life.

In the center of this belly of bodily and built metabolisms, Blessed Blessed Oblivion connects with the artist’s wider practice, drawing bodies closer to both the objects and the social and physical infrastructures that regulate them. Late Night Strollers brings the uncelebrated and hidden in plain sight to the center of display as a form of empathy and re-symbolisation.

Manna’s upcoming exhibitions include the first major solo exhibition in the United States at MoMA PS1, New York, September 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Jumana Manna / MATRIX 278, Berkeley museum of Art, San Francisco; Sketch and Bread, Balade Berlin, Charlottenburg, Villa Oppenheim, Berlin; Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (all 2021); Wild Relatives, Tensta Kunsthall, Sweden (2020); Jumana Manna, Tabakalera, San Sebastian, Spain (2019); Wild Relatives, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2018); 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). Manna has participated in group exhibitions and festivals, including FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial (2022); Manifesta 14, Prishtina (2022); Toronto Biennial of Art (2022; 2019); 11th Taipei Biennial (2018); Nordic Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); Liverpool Biennial (2016); Marrakech Biennale 6 (2016); 54th and 56th Vienna International Film Festivals (2016 and 2018); 66th and 68th Berlinale (2016 and 2018); and CPH:DOX, Copenhagen (2018), IDFA (2021 and 2022) RIDM, Camden Film Festival, Maine and Open City Film Festival, London (2022).

Late Night Strollers is on view September 15 - November 12, 2022.

Gallery hours Thursday-Saturday 12pm–6pm.