Jumana Manna

Jumana Manna

Work from Break, Take, Erase, Tally.

“This ongoing series of ceramic sculptures explores a tension between preservation and ruination. Their forms draw from the khabya, a once common structure for grain storage in rural houses across the Levant. Built into homes, the khabya–which means “the thing that hides” in Arabic–would preserve the annual grain harvest for family and communal consumption. With the advent of refrigeration and state-centralized grain silos, the khabya became obsolete and now can occasionally be found in the remnants of abandoned village structures. While some works maintain a structural similarity to the historical khabya, others adapt the crumbling or fragmented form into new geometries and anthropomorphic, creature like vessels. The surfaces of the works have been coated with tadelakt, a lime-plaster technique unique to Morocco. Resuscitated in various states of fracture and mutation, these clay vessels are set against industrial steel grates such as those used in climate-controlled seed bank storage units, museum vaults, ethnographic institutions, and urban infrastructures. Manna fuses contrasting conceptions and architectures of archiving: from the seed, which stores genetic material for survival, to the khabya vessels, and finally to the safekeeping institution, highlighting a shift from preservation as sustenance to preservation as accumulation.”