Jumana Emil Abboud works with drawing, video, installation, and performance to explore intangible heritage interwoven through narratives surrounding nature and landscapes—specifically water sources. Having studied fine arts in Toronto and Jerusalem, she is currently a practice-led PhD candidate at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. Drawing on her Palestinian origins and the entanglement of folklore, community, and storytelling, Abboud revisits the prism of resources, people, and places that emerge out of history’s depths to imagine reciprocal futures. She focuses on waterscapes as integral sites of story, as the bearers and guardians of collective memory and future cultural legacy. Working across different media, Abboud uses materials as varied as beeswax, turmeric, lace, embroidery, found papers, natural pigments, oral histories, journal entries, drawings, performance, and video. Her practice reflects the urgency for continuity of culture amid measures of disruption and erasure. At the same time, it suggests a process of ongoing metamorphosis and the possibility for poetic repurposing to tap undercurrents of rooted narratives and redefine our survival.

In the performance work Gazelle in a Mother’s Eye (2024), Abboud turns her focus to the landscapes of Saudi Arabia to examine how historic relationships with natural sources, primarily water, have informed present-day legacies. Using the research methods central to her practice, she navigates bodies of water in and around Riyadh, excavating tradition, myth, and oral customs in creating a new work that recognizes the intricate plurality of alignment with the manifest world we call home. Through an immersive study of local folktales and the experience of embedding herself in community contexts and intergenerational collaborations, Abboud invites us to reconsider water entanglement and its co-authored ways of being. What emerges is a site-specific work articulated into spoken word, video, movement, and live drawing, accompanied by metaphor and unfolding truths. The multimedia, multi-iteration artwork involves local participants sharing an extended story of variable parts that hold water close, probing connectivity, remembrance, and the enchantment of belonging.