At The Table with Jumana Emil Abboud

Presented in partnership with British Council, Artes Mundi presents the fifth of six free At The Table talks for AM11.

Jumana Emil Abboud will be in conversation with independent curator, researcher and educator Annie Jael Kwan, writer, creative facilitator and regenerative practitioner Lowri Hedd Vaughan and political ecologist Muna Dajani.

The At The Table series brings together the voices of the six AM11 artists alongside those of international curators, artists, historians, thinkers and writers in a series of roundtable discussions. The talks will centre on themes and ideas present in the artist’s work and the interwoven relationship between histories and practices, locally to internationally.

Imagining we are sitting around a table sharing conversation and exchanging ideas, this event is a chance to hear different concerns and perspectives while getting to know the artist and their work.

The talk will be interpreted in BSL and live captions will be provided.

Palestinian-Canadian artist Jumana Emil Abboud is currently based between Jerusalem and London where she is completing her PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art. Working in spoken-word performance, video, walking, journaling, drawing, and collaborative Water Divining workshops, Abboud’s practice addresses ways in which stories can survive past dispossession. Her work has been presented at Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, Cample Line, Tavros Athens, Documenta, Jameel Arts Centre, Seoul Museum of Art – SeMA, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, the Khaled Shoman Foundation Darat al Funun, at Biennales in Lyon, Sharjah, Venice, Istanbul, and Sydney, at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Bildmuseumamong others.

Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator, researcher and educator based in London, whose work sits at the intersections of contemporary art, archives, and cultural activism, with a focus on feminist/queer and alternative knowledges, collective relations, solidarity, and spiritual justice. She is Director of Something Human, the curatorial initiative that launched Europe’s largest Southeast Asia Performance Collection in 2017. She leads Asia-Art-Activism, an interdisciplinary and intergenerational network, and is a founding council member of the Asia Forum, co-presented with the Bagri Foundation and Asymmetry Art Foundation at the 59th and 60th Venice Biennale. She recently curated the third edition of the Brent Biennial (2023–25).

Lowri Hedd Vaughan is a writer, creative facilitator and regenerative practitioner based across Ynys Môn and Eryri, North Wales. Believing strongly in the power of connection between people and place and caring deeply about healing the story of separation plaguing humanity and nature, Lowri’s creative and community work breathes in service of and flickers with hope for a liveable future. Published and performed works with and for; Cyhoeddiadau’r Stamp, Pontio Arts Centre, BBC Cymru Poet of the Month, Barddas, Literature Across Frontiers, National Museum Wales, Artes Mundi, Testun Testun. A member of Literature Wales’ Representing Wales cohort for 2025/6, her first poetry pamphlet will be published by Cyhoeddiadau’r Stamp in 2027.

Muna Dajani is a political ecologist focused on understanding environmental and water governance through decolonial and critical lenses. She holds a PhD from the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE), where her doctoral research focused on examining community struggles for rights to water and land resources in settler colonial contexts in Palestine and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. She is currently a Fellow in Environment at the Geography and Environment Department at LSE. Her work focuses on exploring ethnographic and historical examinations of the highly contested and politicised transboundary river basins of the Upper Jordan and Yarmouk rivers and nature-society interactions in contexts of settler ecological violence.