Image: Jumana Manna, “A Magical Substance Flows Into Me”, 68 min, HD video, 2015.
Artica Svalbard and Galleri Svalbard are proud to present an artist talk with visual artist, Jumana Manna.
Manna is in Longyearbyen to produce the final part of her work “Untitled”, a documentary seeking to capture the contradictions and ambiguities of modern seed preservation.
Planting the soil with seeds, extracting coal out of mountains, escaping war in one valley, jogging in another; the camera follows radically different human interactions with the earth across two valleys: Longyearbyen in Svalbard, and the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.
An Aleppo-based agricultural research institute withdraws its backup collection of seeds from the “doomsday vault”, in the Arctic Circle, and duplicates it in the Bekaa Valley, to make it accessible to breeders around the world. Tracking the movement of these seeds traces the matrix of intertwined relationships in the global food regime, including governments and philanthropic organisations, scientific research institutes and farmers, crops, animals and insects.
Jumana Manna is a visual artist working primarily with film and sculpture, based in Berlin. Her work explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focussing on the body and materiality in relation to nationalism and histories of place.
Manna has participated in various international exhibitions, biennales and film festivals. She was awarded the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Palestinian Artist Award in 2012, Sandefjord Kunstforenings Kunstpris 2015. Manna is currently nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst in Berlin. In 2017 she is developing new commissions for the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Satellite programme 10 at Jeu de Paume, Paris and CAPC Bordeaux, and The HighLine, New York.