Until 28 June 2026, Jameel Arts Centre is holding The Storyteller and the Obedient Tide, a solo exhibition by Palestinian-Canadian artist Jumana Emil Abboud, which brings together her newly commissioned works alongside existing art pieces. The exhibition offers an immersive exploration of storytelling, folklore, ritual, and memory, examining how narratives travel across generations and geographies while remaining rooted in the landscapes from which they emerge. Curated by Indranjan Banerjee, the show unfolds as a poetic meditation on endurance, belonging, and the enduring relationship between people, land, and water.
For more than two decades, Abboud has developed an artistic language that draws from oral traditions, mythologies, and local knowledge systems. In her work, stories are living entities that connect communities to place, history, and collective imagination. Water, whether in the form of springs, rivers, wells, or seas, occupies a central position in her practice and serves as both a physical necessity and a metaphor for memory, continuity, and transformation. In The Storyteller and the Obedient Tide, these concerns converge, inviting visitors into a world where myth and lived experience intertwine.
The show is structured around two interconnected narrative threads. The first derives from Solwan, a 12th-century collection of moral tales by philosopher Ibn Zafar. Within this text, five virtues — trust, fortitude, patience, contentment, and self-denial — are presented as guiding principles for navigating adversity. Abboud reimagines them as “labours,” framing them not as abstract ideals but as ongoing practices of perseverance and care. Through drawings, sculptures, textiles, video works, and installations, she considers how such values can help sustain individuals and communities through periods of uncertainty and displacement.
The second narrative thread focuses on a folktale shared across Palestinian and Japanese traditions. In one version, a fisherman survives the tyranny of a king through the wisdom of his wife, who belongs to the world of jinn. In another, a fisherman lost at sea finds his way home by following the reflection of a rock. Although separated by geography and culture, the stories reveal striking similarities, speaking to universal themes of survival, guidance and the transmission of knowledge. Abboud uses these parallel narratives to explore how stories migrate across borders and generations, carrying with them traces of collective memory and shared human experience.
Many of the displayed artworks were produced during Abboud’s recent residencies in Japan, as well as through her participation in the V&A Jameel Fellowship in collaboration with CIRVA in Marseille. Several new commissions make their debut here, including Kohl in the Eyes of Zarqa’ and The Premonition Cups, which represent Abboud’s first experiments with glass. These art pieces draw inspiration from legends of prophecy and perception, particularly the story of Zarqaʾ al-Yamamah, a legendary woman renowned for her ability to foresee danger from great distances. The resulting glass forms function as symbolic vessels that hold memory, vision, and possibility. They extend the exhibition’s wider investigation into storytelling as a means of preserving and transmitting knowledge.
New works such as The Fishermen, Lamb-Monster and Something That Fell from the Sky and Came Out of the Well introduce a cast of mythical beings, water spirits, and fantastical creatures. Drawing upon oral histories from Palestine and Japan, these artworks inhabit a liminal territory between folklore and contemporary reality. Abboud treats myth as an active force capable of shaping how communities understand the present and imagine the future.
The exhibition also features older works, including delicate drawings, embroidered textiles, beeswax talismans, carved wooden figures, and video installations. Throughout the varied mediums, recurring motifs of eyes, water sources, seashells, and celestial bodies emerge as symbolic anchors. One particularly evocative image is that of the seashell Solwanah, a mythical object believed to contain virtues capable of alleviating sorrow. For Abboud, the shell becomes a vessel of remembrance and healing, embodying the possibility of renewal amid loss and fragmentation.
While deeply poetic in tone, The Storyteller and the Obedient Tide is also grounded in the realities of Palestinian history and the ongoing struggle for liberation and return. The show reflects on displacement, resilience, and the preservation of cultural memory through the quiet persistence of stories. Abboud suggests that folklore itself can become a form of resistance, a way of safeguarding knowledge, sustaining communal bonds, and maintaining connections to land despite rupture and exile.
About the artist
Jumana Emil Abboud (b. 1971, Palestine), who resides in London (UK), holds a PhD in Fine Art. Working in spoken-word performance, video, installation, walking, journaling, and drawing, Abboud’s practice addresses ways in which stories can survive past dispossession. Her ongoing project Water Diviners (collaborative workshops) exemplifies her commitment to collective storytelling, bringing communities together through shared narratives centred on water, memory, and place.
Her work has been presented in major international exhibitions, including After Rain, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2024); documenta 15 (2022); the Sharjah Biennial 13 (2018); and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), among others. Abboud has also held solo exhibitions at institutions such as BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead, UK), Bildmuseet (Umeå, Sweden), and Darat al Funun (Amman, Jordan), to name a few. Among her recent accolades are nominations for the Joan Miró Prize and the Artes Mundi Prize.
To learn more about The Storyteller and the Obedient Tide, please go to the exhibition’s official web page.
You might also be interested in visiting Time the Destroyer Is Time the Preserver by Jorge Tacla and Observers of Change.
