Jameel Arts Centre kicks off its 2023 public programmes with two performance-focused events, presenting a spoken word piece by Jumana Emil Abboud and the Water Diviners IV as well as a lecture performance by Hussein Nassereddine ‘laughing on the river, your eyes drown in tears’ on January 21, 2023.

On Sunday, January 15,  join artist Jumana Emil Abboud at the Jameel’s Chihuahuan Garden by the Dubai Creek to witness a spoken word performance marking the culmination of the Water Diviners IV,  a three-month-long workshop with 12 UAE-based creatives.  The collective performance builds on the practice of water divining, where storytelling is used to locate sites of water geographically, historically and culturally, in Palestine and beyond. Together, the participants have worked on reading and writing exercises, leading to the collective co-authorship of this experience. They jointly engage with both personal histories and relationships to sites of water as well as broader questions of humanity’s entanglement with ‘the natural’. 

The Water Diviners IV workshop series and performance are programmed in conjunction with the group exhibition ‘An Ocean in Every Drop’ on view through April 2, 2023.

Jumana Emil Abboud uses drawing, video, performance and text to navigate themes of memory, loss, and resilience. Her creative practice is inspired by Palestinian oral history, with a focus on folktales and their connection to actual sites within the landscape, and to water sources in particular. Abboud lives and works in Jerusalem and London where she is currently a PhD candidate at Slade School of Art.