‘The Storyteller and the Obedient Tide’ marks Jumana Emil Abboud’s first solo exhibition in the United Arab Emirates. Through a deep engagement with storytelling, folktales and ritual, Abboud’s work is attuned to land and to the water sources like springs, wells and rivers that sustain it. Drawing on the lineage of Palestinian folktales, she traces their continued resonance in the present. Abboud attends to how stories inhabit landscapes, shape personal histories and collective memory, and create an enchanted relationship to land.
Two key threads guide the works in the exhibition. The first is a set of five virtues, laid out by the 12th-century philosopher Ibn Zafar in his compendium of moral tales Solwan or The Waters of Comfort, which he wrote as a moral guide to rulers of the time. These five virtues— Trust, Fortitude, Patience, Contentment and Self-denial— are described by the artist as “labours”. They unfold in her work as a quiet practice of servitude and obedience.

The second thread traces Abboud’s engagement with a folktale involving fishermen, found in Palestinian and Japanese folklore, with striking similarities. In the Palestinian story, a fisherman survives a king’s tyranny through the knowledge of his wife, who belongs to the world of Jinns. In a Japanese tale, a fisherman’s faith in a rock’s reflection guides him home when lost at sea. These two stories, connected across cultures and seas, reveal shared acts of survival carried by kinship and memory.
In one of the tales in Solwan, a seashell named Solwanah was said to carry virtues that could heal sorrow. Abboud brings in the seashell as a mnemonic vessel that holds space for repair and transformation, and asks: how do we persist, insist and imagine a future with renewed enchantment, revived folklore and rekindled communal belonging? Drawing on Palestinian folktales, Abboud traces these stories’ resonance in the present.

The artworks gathered in ‘The Storyteller and the Obedient Tide’ are like traces and fragments left by the tide’s ebb and flow. They drift across time and geography, fact and mythology, and are grounded in the context of the Palestinian struggle for liberation and return, offering a portrait of endurance. Mirroring the exhibition’s title, the tide’s devotion to the moon’s pull and the storyteller’s slow telling prompt the central question of the exhibition: how do we carry light, across oceans, across ruins, across silence, without letting it be extinguished?

Curated by Indranjan Banerjee.

Download the exhibition guide here.

Image credit: Jumana Emil Abboud, Our Other Half (detail), gauche, ink, aquarelle, pencil, pastel on paper, 57x76cm, 2024-2025. Photo by Mike Bolam for Cample Line.