In Aching Agony and Longing I Wait For You by the Spring of Thieves

Posing questions about memory, the body, folklore and rituals, Jumana Emil Abboud’s artistic practice confronts the telling and retelling of history and the impacts of language and the fragmentation of memories. The Jerusalem-based artist’s oeuvre includes visual, poetic and text-based projects spanning 20 years; In aching agony and longing I wait for you by the Spring of Thieves focuses on two projects—Maskouneh (Inhabited), 2015–2017, and I Feel Nothing, 2012–2015. Closing the book are contributions by Marina Warner and Tina Sherwell that thoughtfully engage with Abboud’s practice at large.

The two main chapters of In aching agony and longing I wait for you by the Spring of Thieves focus on Abboud’s long engagement with folktales from Palestine and elsewhere. The first chapter brings together drawings, video stills and performance excerpts, all of which belong to Maskouneh (Inhabited), a series that explores Abboud’s connection to the landscape and folktales of her homeland.

These works are paired with journal entries from her recent collaboration with filmmaker Issa Freij, in which they return to haunted springs and water wells described in 1922 by ethnographer Tawfiq Canaan. A second chapter similarly represents drawings and video stills from Abboud’s series I Feel Nothing, inspired by a Palestinian variant of the folktale “The Girl Whose Hands were Cut Off”. In aching agony and longing I wait for you by the Spring of Thieves marks the finissage of Abboud’s solo exhibition, The Horse, the Bird, the Tree and the Stone at Bildmuseet in Sweden and the inauguration of her dedicated show The pomegranate and the sleeping ghoul at Darat al Funun–The Khalid Shoman Foundation in Jordan.