Jumana Manna

Jumana Manna’s Middle Ghost (2022) extends the artist’s exhibition at MoMA PS1 into the cityscape with a new sculpture on view in the Greenstreet and public plaza at the museum’s main entrance. Jumana Manna: Take, Break, Erase, Tally marks the artist’s first major museum exhibition in the US, and features a new large-scale installation of her Cache series, which includes this sculpture. These works take inspiration from the form of the khabya, a once-common structure for grain storage in rural homes across the Levant. Built into homes, the khabya–which means “the thing that hides” in Arabic–would preserve the annual grain harvest for family and communal consumption. With the advent of refrigeration and state-centralized grain silos, the khabya became obsolete and now can occasionally be found in the remnants of abandoned village structures. Juxtaposed with a plinth assembled from industrial materials reminiscent of seed bank storage units, museum vaults, and urban infrastructures, Manna considers the shift of storage systems from sources of sustenance tied to agricultural life cycles to sites of capital growth. The sculpture explores tension between preservation and ruination, a theme running through Manna’s multidisciplinary practice.

Middle Ghost is presented in collaboration with NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program, and marks the first public artwork organized by PS1 in the public plaza.