In August 2020, Palestinian artist Jumana Manna conceived of a multi-part online screening program for e-flux titled Take Me Back. Highlighting works by both contemporary and historical filmmakers and artists, the series served to examine late 20th- and early 21st-century histories of migration from rural to urban centres—particularly in the Arab world—and work that pushed back against, in her words, “modernity’s disregard for agrarian life.”
While the title may have served as a sly nod to the curtailment of global movement as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, six months in, the beautifully polysemous phrase “take me back” serves as a valuable entry point for a consideration of Manna’s own movingimage practice. For Manna, raised in Jerusalem, the most immediate and obvious connection may be drawn to the question of the diaspora’s right of return, as well as the reclamation of territories lost in the 1948 annexation by Israeli settlers. But her nimble practice is grounded in even broader questions of movement—of people, of traditions, of music, of crops—across not just space, but also eras. While almost always premised on extensive research that responds to historical as well as geopolitical realities, Manna’s work never feels leaden or fixed, instead operating within a remarkably deft and contemporary framework that employs cinematic means to imagine and temporarily challenge established orders.
