radical hope or, how we make joy in defiance …
Jumana manna in conversation with tj demos in collaboration WITH VIAD
Online
03 September 2025
In this discussion, Manna and Demos reflect on radical and everyday refusals. The artist considers what radical hope might do in the face of ongoing genocide, ecocide, scholasticide and aestheticide. As a Thought Dialogue for the Imagined New (or, what happens when History is a Catastrophe?), both the artist and her discussant are asked: If incarceration can be defied through mawasim, how might a historical-future outside of colonised timespace be imagined; beyond the erasures of life which living under occupation enacts? And how do these aesthetic gestures carry the hope of free Palestine outside of frames of resistance?
Considering her own tactics for confronting violence and catastrophe, Jumana Manna engages with T.J. Demos in a generative public conversation.
ABOUT jumana manna
Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and its regeneration.
Manna is Moving Image Associate Chair at Bard’s MFA program, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. She was previously a visiting lecturer at Harvard University, the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, and has taught at Homeworks Space Program, Beirut and Birzeit University, Palestine. Jumana is represented by Hollybush Gardens Gallery, and her films are distributed by LUX.
Jumana Manna lives in Jerusalem and Berlin.
ABOUT tj demos
TJ Demos is the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History, Department of History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos’s award-winning writing spans the intersecting fields of art history, contemporary art, visual culture and ecology, as well as global and environmental politics.
Demos is the author of, inter alia, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg, 2023); Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke, 2020); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg, 2016); and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg, 2017). Demos co-edited The Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (Routledge, 2021); was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020); and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project ‘Beyond the End of the World’ (2019-2021). He is Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence programme at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon. In 2014, Demos was awarded the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association.
