Your Time Passes and Mine Has No Ends

Hollybush Gardens is pleased to present Your Time Passes and Mine Has No Ends, Jumana Manna’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Moving between the seemingly divergent media of collage, cinema, and abstract sculpture, Manna addresses how performing bodies, material fragments, and landscapes both desire and narrate pasts, presents, and futures that remain excessive to the violence imposed on them. Her recent work considers the paradoxes of preservation – how disciplines and systems of conservation regulate, extract, or suppress – probing the tension between modernist approaches that standardise cultural forms and the unruliness of ruination, life and regeneration. Your Time Passes and Mine Has No Ends is a new installation which includes a series of hand-crafted banners and embroidered scarves, steel balcony structures, and ropes. The textiles bear quotations written by, to, or about Palestinian political prisoners alongside compositions inspired by the history of the commons and rituals of mass assembly in Palestine. Before the Nakba of 1948, festivities called mawasim (Arabic for ‘the seasons’) took place, where handmade banners and processions played a central role. The two most prominent were the Nabi Musa festival, a week-long procession and encampment between Jerusalem and Jericho, and Nabi Rubin, a month-long festival on the coast between Gaza and Jaffa. Combining literary and archival photographic citations, the installation enacts the memory of these pre-Nakba, liberatory celebrations, overlaying them with creative practices by Palestinians refusing Zionism’s attempts to fragment and isolate political prisoners and the wider Palestinian social fabric. The large banners Stone Notes and Come, Let’s Go Together, suspended with rope stretched between I- beams, feature recurring motifs including bars – a reference to both incarceration and notation – and rocks – as both sacred markers in the landscape and a weapon against the Occupation – alongside archival images from the mawasim rituals, such as a photograph of ribbons tied to shrine windows. The patchwork diptych explores the theme of failing indexes: grids and spreadsheets appear to collapse, with numbers and letters tumbling from cells, indicating the rubble of policy and the disintegration of order. The pale- brown dyed fabric alludes to manila folders often used to store archival material, speaking to Manna’s interest in archival practices and the re-appropriation of colonial archives towards anti-colonial cultural production. Historical Transmission is a short video loop juxtaposing archival footage of the Nabi Musa festival filmed in Jerusalem by a Western tourist in 1929. Found by Manna last year in the Harvard Film Archive, the photographer’s uninformed gaze at the meaning or intention of the festivities is highlighted by the orientalist captions interspersed throughout his footage. Manna overlays the material with contemporary found footage of the release of Palestinian prisoners being welcomed home by crowds in the West Bank and Gaza in 2025. Visitation brings these two worlds together, interweaving a historical image of a festivity in Tel al-Muntar in Gaza from c.1930 with a photograph of the release of Palestinian political prisoners as part of the prisoner–hostage exchange in November 2023. Along the bottom edge of the textile is an embroidered quotation from a novella by the martyred prisoner and author Walid Daqqa, which reads “I am standing in front of you, baba”. Together with the protruding metal structures of ruined or unfinished houses, which no longer support or never came to hold the balconies they were designed for, the banners insist on continuity and historical transmission against enclosure, foregrounding the radical spirit of defiance in Palestinian joy and lyrical traditions. Writing, encoded onto the performance of collective movement, becomes both a carrier of memory and a site of resistance that insists on breaking through the material and psychological bars of captivity. Jumana Manna (b. 1987) is a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker. She lives in Jerusalem and Berlin. Forthcoming solo projects in 2026 include Collection Lambert, Avignon, and Sebastia, a large-scale public art commission at the Norwegian Government Quarter, Oslo. Her solo exhibitions include Break, Take, Erase, Tally (touring), Rialto6, Lisbon; Kunsthall Stavanger; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; MoMA PS1, New York (2022–24); Preservation Paradox, Matadero Madrid; Foragers, Hollybush Gardens, London (both 2022); Jumana Manna / MATRIX 278, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco; Sketch and Bread, Balade Berlin-Charlottenburg, Villa Oppenheim, Berlin; Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; Jumana Manna, Hollybush Gardens, London (all 2021); Wild Relatives, Tensta konsthall, Sweden (2020); Jumana Manna, Tabakalera, San Sebastian, Spain (2019); Wild Relatives, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2018); Wild Relatives, Jeu de Paume's Satellite 10 program at MABA and CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2017); A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (touring) Mercer Union, Toronto (2017); Malmö Kunsthall, Sweden (2016); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); and Menace of Origins, SculptureCenter, New York (2014). Forthcoming group exhibitions include Seeds: Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures, Vienna Climate Biennial, Kunsthaus Wien; and Sonsbeek 2026, Arnheim; (all 2026). Manna has participated in significant group exhibitions and festivals, including a recent retrospective of her films at Cinema du réel, 48th International Documentary Film Festival, Paris; For Our Time is the Time of Water, Tavros Art Space, Athens (all 2026); we refuse_d (touring) M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2025–26); The City of Women, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Seeds: Containers of a World to Come, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; New World Order, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Accumulation – On Collecting, Growth and Excess, Migros Museum, Zurich; Capitol Modern, Aloha Nõ, Hawai’i Triennial (all 2025) Earthworks, Bergen Kunsthall; Manif d'Art - La biennale de Québec; Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck, Austria (all 2024); 13th Taipei Biennial, Small World, Taipei; Liquid Intelligence, TBA21, Madrid; EVA International, Limerick, Ireland; In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, Kuchi- Muziris Biennale; The Creative Human, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; The Butterfly Affect, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Being as Communion, Thessaloniki Biennial 8 (all 2023); Alexandria: Past Futures, Bozar, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels; Forest: Wake This Ground, Arnolfini, Bristol; Manifesta 14, Prishtina, Kosovo; FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial (all 2022); Toronto Biennial of Art (2022; 2019); Nordic Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); Liverpool Biennial (2016); Marrakech Biennale 6 (2016); 54th and 56th Vienna International Film Festivals (2016 and 2018); 66th and 68th Berlinale (2016 and 2018); and CPH:DOX, Copenhagen (2018). Manna’s latest film Foragers (2022) won a number of awards. She has been granted the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts (2017), the Environmental Award at Sheffield Doc Fest (2018), and the Chicken & Egg Award for women and gender- expansive documentary filmmakers (2024). Manna's work is held in significant public and private collections internationally, including Carre d’art, Nîmes; Centre Pompidou, Paris; CCS Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Fundacion TBA21, Vienna; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway; Kadist Foundation, Paris, France; MCA Chicago; MoMA, New York; Muzeum Sztuki, Łodz, Poland; National Museum of Norway, Oslo; Sharjah Art Foundation; Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Norway; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Visit

1-2 Warner Yard, EC1R 5EY

London, NY