Where Water Remembers: Jumana Emil Abboud’s Stories Flow into Jameel Arts Centre
Water listens, remembers, and carries stories across time. In The Storyteller and the Obedient Tide, opening on Tuesday, January 27, 2026, at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, Palestinian artist Jumana Emil Abboud invites audiences into a world where storytelling is a living force—fluid, ritualistic, and deeply rooted in ancestral memory. This exhibition marks Abboud’s first solo presentation in the UAE, offering a rare and immersive encounter with one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary art today.
ArtDayMe:The opening evening begins at 6:30 pm with a spoken-word performance by the artist, followed by a reception from 7:00 to 8:30 pm. The performance sets the tone for an exhibition shaped by oral traditions, ancient folktales, and the symbolic and material presence of water as a keeper of history.
Abboud’s multidisciplinary practice spans spoken word, drawing, video, and collaborative “Water Diviners” gatherings, through which she re-spirits storytelling as an active, relational process. In her work, stories are not static narratives but living entities—carried through water, land, and human connection—linking memory to futures of possibility.
Born in 1971 in Shefa-Amr (Shfar’am), Abboud moved to Canada at the age of eight, where her early engagement with visual art began as a way of navigating language and displacement. She studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto before returning to Palestine following the sudden death of her father, later graduating from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in 1996. She currently lives and works in Jerusalem.
Abboud has received major regional and international recognition, including the AFAC Grant, the Pernod Ricard Fellowship, and a Sharjah Art Foundation production grant. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Sydney Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, and Istanbul Biennial, as well as at institutions such as the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Bahrain National Museum, Darat al Funun in Amman, and Carré d’Art in Nîmes.
The Storyteller and the Obedient Tide positions water as both medium and metaphor—an archive of collective experience and a site of continuity and care. Through this exhibition, Jameel Arts Centre offers audiences an opportunity to listen closely to stories that resist erasure and flow quietly, persistently, into the present.
Jameel Arts Centre and the Jaddaf Waterfront Sculpture Park are open-access and free for all ages. Visiting hours are Saturday to Thursday from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm, Friday from 12:00 pm to 8:00 pm, with Tuesday closed.
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