May 21 2025

These Seasons | Performance: A River’s Keepers with Jumana Emil Abboud

Wed | 6.30PM

As part of These Seasons, SI is pleased to present A River’s Keepers, a collective storytelling performance led by artist Jumana Emil Abboud that will take place on our rooftop. Foregrounding “mythed” and embodied relations to water sources both near and far through spoken word and mark-making, this performance emerges from a series of  workshops with a select group of participants held between February and April 2025. The event will involve Abboud and her workshop participants collaboratively constructing a narrative based on their personal and social connections to rivers and streams in New York and beyond.

These Seasons is an ongoing transdisciplinary public program that invites artists, scholars and writers to explore theories of nature, landscape, ecology, human and non-human life forms and climate action.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

Jumana Emil Abboud is a Palestinian Canadian artist whose practice draws on folk tales, water lore, and interconnected human and more-than-human legacies. Merging cultural tradition with contemporary life, she explores the continuity of stories and landscapes past dispossession. Her multi-disciplinary practice has been included in exhibitions and Biennales, among them, the Diriyah Biennale (2024); documenta 15 (2022); the 23^rd Biennale of Sydney (2022); the Jerusalem Show (2009, 2018); the Venice Biennale (2009, 2015), the Sharjah Biennale (2005, 2011); and solo exhibitions at Cample Line (2023); Tavros Athens (2022); the Khaled Shoman Foundation Darat al Funun, Bildmuseum University, Umea (2017); and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (2016). Abboud is currently a Jameel Fellow at the V&A London, in partnership with Cirva, Marseille.

Image: The Water Diviners, Palestine group, water-mapping, 2021. Jumana Emil Abboud.