Jumanah Abbas
Jumanah Abbas
Jumanah Abbas; I Had Come From the Sea, 2020-ongoing; Prints of digital maps; Dimensions variable
Jumanah Abbas; I Had Come From the Sea (detail), 2020-ongoing; Prints of digital maps; Dimensions variable
Jumanah Abbas; I Had Come From the Sea (detail), 2020-ongoing; Prints of digital maps; Dimensions variable
I HAD COME FROM THE SEA
I Had Come from the Sea is a dossier that visualizes testimonies to reveal what happens within, as well as around, the sea of Palestine. These maps are used to project moments of fishing across different times and coordinates, as they spatialize each fisherman’s lived experience.
Read as counter-maps, the fishers’ testimonies are placed within a maritime geography, and its geopolitical boundaries that can be driven by two conditions for coastal labor: time and distance. The objective of these maps is to heighten the visibilities of fishing practices, retelling the many encounters between the fisher and the navy army, and offering a pathway through which these testimonies can make claims to the sea.
As time is frozen and coordinates are brought to the foreground, these maps are at risk of repeating the traps of colonial cartographies, which flatten, abstract, and erase the human experience. What differs in these maps, is that the livelihood of the fisher surfaces, and lives in the viewer’s imagination.
BIO
Jumanah Abbas is an architect, writer, and curator, working through an ecology of interdisciplinarity that architecture concepts, debates, and dialogues engage with.
Jumanah is part of ongoing collaborations with institutes, regional organizations, and universities. Mapping Memories of Resistance: The Untold Story of the Occupation of the Golan Heights is a project in collaboration with London School of Economics, Birzeit University, and Al Marsad, Arab Human Rights Center in Golan Heights. Another is Tasmeem Biennial 2022, themed around Radical Futures, by Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts in Qatar, where she curated the biennial spatial design. She is currently working towards the realization of Qatar Museums’ Quadrennial Project, a multi-site art exhibition opening in 2024.
@JUMANAHABBAS_