This major exhibition charts the artist’s multidisciplinary practice, which explores the paradoxical effects of preservation practices in agriculture, science, and the law. The exhibition at Kunsthall Stavanger brings together for the first time in Norway nearly 20 works including two recent films and a series of new and existing sculptures.
Manna’s work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna investigates the relationships between humans, land, and the colonial power structures that act upon them. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration.
“Break, Take, Erase, Tally” at Kunsthall Stavanger includes film and sculpture installations that together question “not whether to preserve, but who gets to decide what lives on and how.” The film Wild Relatives exemplifies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to underscore the scientific limitations in recovering the loss of biological life, in all of its forms. The work visualizes the slow violence of industrial agriculture while asking poignant questions about what kind of future is possible in a precarious present. In her new film Foragers, Manna moves between documentary and fiction to chronicle confrontations between Palestinian pickers of wild growing herbs, and the Israeli Nature Protection Authority, which has deemed the plants endangered. The foragers’ refusal and the punishments they face, from large fines and potential jail time, at times takes on an absurdist and comical tone that raises key questions around the politics of extinction.
The exhibition also features a new large-scale installation of the Cache series. The anthropomorphic ceramic sculptures take inspiration from the fragmented remains of khabyas, traditional and now obsolete structures for grain storage in the Levant. The sculptures are placed in dialogue with the artist’s signature industrial plinth assemblages, which borrow materials found in the urban environment—from construction sites to drainage systems.
The works presented in “Break, Take, Erase, Tally” at Kunsthall Stavanger explore the land and its rhythms as the basis for ways of life that can also serve to resist, evade, and transform hegemonic power structures. Taken together, the works not only demand that we examine the powers at play in our daily lives, but show us how we might envision a different landscape inspired by resilience and relation.
at Kunsthall Stavanger
until August 25, 2024