Blessed Blessed Oblivion
Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), Jumana Manna’s BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION (HD video, 21:00 min, 2010) is set in the car-body and barbers shops, body building gyms and car-washes of East Jerusalem, the artist’s home-town. The film weaves together a sensual portrait of male thug culture that reveals the pious rituals and male codes of honour, which mask narcissism and a disdain for and casual violence towards women, and, thus, suggests alternative zones of conflict within the Palestinian struggle.
“What makes her work not only captivating but brave is that she deliberately complicates the accepted—or expected—histories of places and people, revealing the contradictions they suppress.” Kaelen Wilson-Goldie in Artforum March 2014 (full article here courtesy of CRG Gallery, New York and Artforum).
Expanding The Archive: Jumma Manna in conversation with Sheyma Buali
“In A Sketch of Manners, as for my older works Blessed Blessed Oblivion and The Umpire Whispers, which are also filmed in Jerusalem, I wanted to bring attention to the multi-faceted social fabric of Jerusalem, and the particular kind of dark humour in the city. There is a certain mendacity in Jerusalem, as well as a certain quality of neglect, that is in contrast to the imaginary of the city as a holy, serene, ancient promised land. Religious travellers who have come here for centuries write travel logs about their experience of arriving in Jerusalem, and their subsequent disappointment at the normalcy of the ‘holy city’. Their fantastical projections are deflated when they arrive and see the poverty, the cynical businessmen selling identical souvenirs, and just the banality of daily life. I like to think that the projections of the various imaginaries of Jerusalem insert a subliminal spiritual layer in the city that you have to make an effort to tune into. It is precisely that foggy area between the melancholic mendacity and the religious fantasy of Jerusalem that I would like to capture. The frivolous characters I choose to focus on bring a perverted image of the holy city through their obsessions with artificiality, games and lies.” Jumana Manna (read the entire conversation here).
Courtesy Ibraaz, Sheyma Buali and the artist.
The Apparatus of the Game – Kate Sutton on Jamma Manna
Read here.
Courtesy Bidoun, Kate Sutton and the artist.
A fragment of The Umpire Whispers
Watch on vimeo here.
