It takes as its starting point German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann’s field recordings of ‘Oriental’ groups in Palestine in the 1930s and his Oriental Music radio series made for the Palestinian Broadcasting Service; established under the British Mandate (1920-1948). Responding to Lachmann’s project, Manna revisits the communities that he studied–including Kurdish, Moroccan, and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians–replaying his recordings and making new recordings of her own. These exchanges take place in their homes, offices, recording studios, and places of worship, and are interspersed with scenes from her own family home in East Jerusalem. Weaving from one site to another, the intertwinement of heritage and identities are presented, along with the imagining of a multifaceted Palestine which in light of recent events takes on powerful resonance.

As Negar Azimi states:

“A magical substance flows into me opens with a crackly voice recording of Dr. Robert Lachmann, an enigmatic Jewish-German ethnomusicologist who emigrated to 1930s Palestine. While attempting to establish an archive and department of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University, Lachmann created a radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service called “Oriental Music”, where he would invite members of local communities to perform their vernacular music. Over the course of the film she follows in Lachmann’s footsteps and visit Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians, as they exist today within the geographic space of historical Palestine. Manna engages them in conversation around their music, while lingering over that music’s history as well as its current, sometimes endangered state. Intercutting these encounters with musicians, are a series of vignettes of interactions of the artist with her parents in the bounds of their family home. In a metaphorical excavation of an endlessly contested history, the film’s preoccupations include: the complexities embedded in language, as well as desire and the aural set against the notion of impossibility. Within the hackneyed one-dimensional ideas about Palestine/Israel, this impossibility becomes itself a trope that defines the Palestinian landscape.”

The DHG was delighted to present Manna’s first solo exhibition in Ireland in 2018, Wild Relatives, which brought together new sculptural work alongside the artist’s 2018 feature-length documentary film which traversed disparate geographies, political contexts and personal lives to create a series of loose links around its main protagonist: seeds.

A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (2016)
HD video, 66 min

Written and Directed by Jumana Manna; Director of Photography: Daniel Kedem; Sound Recording: Antoine Brochu; Editing: Katrin Ebersohn & Jumana Manna; Sound Design & Mixing: Jochen Jezussek; Color Correction: Wolfgang Gaube; and Executive Producer: Polly Staple.

Video courtesy of the artist

Jumana Manna (b. 1987) was awarded the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Palestinian Artist Award in 2012, the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts in 2017 and was nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst in Berlin in the same year. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2018/2019; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, 2018; Mercer Union, Toronto, 2017; Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK, 2015; Malmo Konsthall, SE, 2016; Beirut Art Center, Lebanon, 2015; and Sculpture Center, New York, USA, 2014. Manna has participated in group exhibitions in the Toronto Biennial (2019), Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2017), 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. Manna’s films have been screened in festivals such as the 54th and 56th Viennale International Film Festival, International Film Festivals, 66th and 68th Berlinale and CPH: DOX 2018, where Wild Relatives won the New: Visions award. Raised in Jerusalem, Manna is currently based in Berlin.

Image: Jumana Manna, A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (2016) film still,  HD video, 66 min.