Jumana Manna

The Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism explicitly and comprehensively distances itself from the statements made by Jumana Manna and her posts shared on social media regarding the terrorist attack carried out by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023 and the events that followed. We fundamentally condemn any glorification of terror, war and violence.

Jumana Manna (born in New Jersey in 1987) devotes her work in sculpture and film to the manifestation of power and its relationships with materials, places, and the human body. Alongside abstract sculptures, she develops film narratives that engage with current discourses and political topics, often from a personal perspective. Her works are generally the product of extensive research. Combining fact and fiction, biographical and archival materials, they use scholarly methods to explore the construction of national narratives and ideologies.

Video, 66 min

In her film A Magical Substance Flows Into Me, Jumana Manna considers the diversity of Palestinian and Oriental-Jewish music in and around Jerusalem. The film was inspired by the work of German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann, who explored the musical traditions of the region in his radio program Oriental Music, aired by the Palestine Broadcasting Service in 1936-37. The program presented songs by members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Kurds, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, Bedouins, and Coptic Christians. Decades later, the artist visits representatives of these manifold groups at their places of residence and worship, and asks them to perform their music. With this multidimensional approach, she brings attention to the fact that modern national identities are being built at the expense of diversity and are subject to ongoing instrumentalization through political control mechanisms. A series of vignettes of her family home intercut these encounters, thereby embedding Manna’s own subjectivity within the larger historical narrative portrayed in the film. With empathy and humor, she traces the complex connections between physically and culturally segregated communities.