Blue Elbow (Coude Bleu)

2015 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

99.9 x 41.9 x 27 cm

Jumana Manna

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Blue Elbow (Coude bleu) is made from plaster, burlap, lacquer, pigments and plastics. The materials related to the techniques of the sculpture or the painting but also others, which refer to commerce, to objects of consumption. The chair refers directly to the body as does the title of the work, Blue Elbow . The amphora itself becomes organic and opposes the rigidity of the chair. The chair becomes elbow and the evocation of the blue brings back to the body, to a wound, to an injury. She calls the vases of this series “Muscle Vases”. The work is part of the Menace of the Origins project which begun at the Sculpture Center in New York in 2014. The project highlights the potential violence of archaeological excavations and the instrumentalization of remains. Manna often refers to a predominantly masculine and western violence that comes from the experience of the power here represented by penetration. For Manna, sculptures are a privileged space for exploring materiality, the physical relation that the body has with objects, space and materials; she states: “I am interested in the way objects are vehicles or agents like our bodies are ships of subjectivity”.

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Jumana Manna is a Berlin-based artist whose work revolves around the body, national identity, and historical narratives. She produces films and installations that employ methodologies sometimes attributed to the historian or the anthropologist. She immerses herself in her projects to define a practice that questions the limits of the body in relation to historical and national narratives. She creates sculptures that are both deconstructions and aggregations of many elements. She uses resin but also bones, wood, or ready-made objects. The objects are reused in ways other than the ones that have been assigned to them, allowing for new stories to be told, and affirming their material dimension.

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Colors:

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• consumption.n.03
• body.n.01
• archeology.n.01
• violence.n.01
• power.n.01
• materiality.n.01