Jumana Emil Abboud – interview

‘We can be anything we want to be through the stories we can make and unmake’

For her solo presentation at Mostyn, Abboud (b1971, Shefa’Amr; lives and works in London and Jerusalem) combines new and previous work developed along themes familiar to those who saw her show The Unbearable Halfness of Being at Documenta 15 (2022). Her work explores landscapes as sites of memory and imagination. Drawing on folklore, mythmaking and storytelling, she articulates the strains placed on community and family life through repeated displacement and her own Palestinian experiences of annexation. For Artes Mundi, her key theme is water: the role of natural springs, wells and rivers in local myth and lore, which she explores through the practice of divining – not so much water divining in the traditional sense, as story divining. This divining includes working with local communities to create shared stories around water sources that are then retold as they process through the landscape, often captured on film. She established this practice first in Palestine, has since taken it to Japan and Germany, and now brings it to Wales. For the week preceding Artes Mundi’s opening at Mostyn, she accompanied locals on their own journeys visiting significant wells and freshwater springs around Llandudno. Some of the resulting stories were shared in a performance at the gallery on the show’s opening night.

“My relationship with water goes back a very long time,” she tells us. “It goes back to my childhood and stories told by my female elders around or under olive groves.” While those tales were usually cautionary, intended to keep children away from water sources, she reframes that relationship, embracing their importance as places of gathering. “Stories and folklore and water: it’s all interconnected,” she says.

Jumana Emil Abboud, installation view, Mostyn, Artes Mundi 11, 2025-26. Photo: Rob Battersby.

At Mostyn and in Cardiff, Abboud presents drawings as part of her “imaginative recreation” of ancient and modern mythologies, using natural ink and materials. “My practice finds its resting place in a naive approach. Where is the innocent approach to the landscape and the human story? So much of our experience is already burdened with … political thoughts of diaspora, occupation. We are burdened and carrying these stories with us. It makes our imagination so limiting. I want to go back to this place of innocence.”

Scattered around the room are totems or charms inspired by precious or significant items that she has asked people to bring her from water sources of significance. They have been cast, remodelled in wax, and placed around the gallery, on tables and shelves, accompanied by handwritten notes, lyrical phrases and poems. The paler ones are made from candle wax (in Palestine, it has long been traditional to burn candles near significant water sources), others from beeswax, occasionally mixed with turmeric to give them a warm, golden hue. In Mostyn, she is also showing a series of embroideries made in conjunction with a Welsh community group, working with female refugees. There are also three glowing, hand-blown glass bowls, made with artisans in Marseille. The bowls are intended to operate as notional portals to other realms, echoing the belief systems of Welsh druids, who revered water sources as places for divination and communion with the spirits.

Jumana Emil Abboud, installation view, Mostyn, Artes Mundi 11, 2025-26. Photo: Rob Battersby.

Abboud is currently completing a PhD at Slade School of Fine Art. Her work has been shown at Aomori Contemporary Art Centre in Japan, Cample Line in Scotland, Tavros Art Space in Athens, Documenta, Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai and the Seoul Museum of Art, among other places.

Artes Mundi 11, 2025
Jumana Emil Abboud, National Museum Cardiff and Mostyn, Llandudno
24 October 2025 – 1 March 2026

Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY