Stone Assemblies takes Jumana Manna's major public artwork for Oslo's Government Quarter as its starting point, opening up a collective reflection on the politics of stone, ruination, and dissent.
Stone Assemblies is an initiative that unfolded in parallel with, but independent from, the production of Sebastia, an 800-square-meter artwork and city floor by Jumana Manna in the newly rebuilt Government Quarter in Oslo. Taking the political and cultural history of extraction and land struggles in Palestine and Norway as its starting point, this volume offers a set of proposals through which the politics of stone, ruination, and dissent might be reimagined.
Through essays, poems, artworks, and conversations, the diverse contributors critically and creatively intervene into what art, language, and the workings of culture more broadly can do in and against the nation-state's normative terms of order: ceasefire, assimilation, disposability, and the vertical models of governance and memorialisation.
Shaped by a range of diasporic and Indigenous traditions, Stone Assemblies gestures towards an embrace of all that remains to be reassembled, renewed, and re-membered as we persist in our anti-extractivist, anticolonial practices of art and gathering.
Jumana Manna, born 1987, is an American born Palestinian artist based in Berlin. She is a graduate of CalArts and a graduate of both the National Academy of the Arts Oslo and the Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem. She makes films and sculptures that explore the ways in which social, political and interpersonal forms of power interact with the human body. Her films weave together fact and fiction, biographical and archival materials, to investigate constructions of national and historical narratives. Her sculptures, more abstract by comparison, take interest in the calcifications of memory, as represented by the artefact real or forged.
Recent solo exhibitions include venues such as Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK (2015); Malmö Konsthall, SE (2016); Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2015); and Sculpture Center, New York, USA (2014). She has participated in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Liverpool Biennial, 20th Biennale of Sydney, Marrakech Biennale 6, The Jerusalem Show VII, Al Ma'mal Foundation, and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Bærum. Her films have been screened in festivals such as the 54th Viennale International Film Festival, 66th Berlinale Forum and IFFR Rotterdam. Manna was awarded the A.M. Qattan Foundation's Young Palestinian Artist Award in 2012, the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts 2017, and was a nominee of the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst in Berlin.
Edited by Rana Issa and Jumana Manna with Liv Brissach.
Contributions by Mohamed Abdi, Heba Al-Agha, Priya Bains, Wendy Brown, Samia Halaby, Iman Issa, Wendy Lotterman, Fred Moten, Kathrine Nedrejord, Abdaljawad Omar, Sarah Rifky, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Drew Snyder, Oraib Toukan, Haytham el-Wardany.
