Jumana Azzam is a Syrian writer and artist working in exile. She studies Critical Studies at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Her work explores the temporality of the image, and the role of reading and description in the construction of the imagination as well as in the restoration of the archive. Her recent research focuses on oral literature, folklore, the rhymes of soothsayers, and the fantastical dimensions of classical Arab imagination — in other words, forms of folkloric speech excluded from the dominant literary canon. Her research materials are often presented as books and lectures incorporated into multimedia installations.