Gutted

Jumana Manna’s practice delves into the entangled relationships between bodies, infrastructure, and the politics of decay. Drawing from her background in both visual arts and sports, and rooted in her experience growing up in Jerusalem, Manna often investigates how systems, whether political, ecological, or biological, both shape and are shaped by processes of erosion, resilience, and resistance. Her work challenges conventional notions of purity and preservation, instead embracing decomposition as a vital and generative force.

In her sculptural series Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, Manna turns her attention to the hidden networks of wastewater systems, approaching them as metaphorical extensions of the human body. These winding ceramic forms, visceral, organic, and vaguely anatomical, evoke intestines, ancient plumbing, or remnants of unearthed ruins. They make visible what typically remains buried or out of sight, revealing the subterranean infrastructures that carry away what is deemed waste. By referencing the persistent forms of pipes dating back to antiquity, Manna connects past and present, civilization and corporeality.

Her sculptures challenge the impulse to isolate or discard what is considered impure. Instead, they suggest a reconsideration of waste as something with potential, not just for contamination, but for reconfiguration and new meaning. Hovering between artifact and organ, the works echo Manna’s broader interest in how forms of care, maintenance, and decay reveal the tensions within social and ecological systems.

Her ceramics act as connectors between oceanic and terrestrial life, as elements that link the parts of a vast ecosystem increasingly subjected to human control. Each piece appears as a fragment—just as Melville’s work, through its chapters, seems to let multiple perspectives and pieces of information flow in and out, creating an encyclopedic book that is, in fact, the sum of many books.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Moby Dick. The Whale. The Story of a Myth from Antiquity to Contemporary Art", Palazzo Ducale, Genova, 2025)