PHOTO:Zineb Sedira-A Brief Moment
Zineb Sedira’s multiple identities as a French-born Algerian living in England and work in Paris, London and Algiers, inform her haunting photographs and video installations, which consider questions of memory, displacement, and the transmission of history. Her interest lies in the expression of intimacy and the personal and biographic from a multicultural perspective. She thus merges everyday images of life in the West with Arab rituals.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Jeu de Paume Archive
Zineb Sedira’s solo exhibition “A Brief Moment” at the Jeu de Paume spans the period from 1998 to the present day and embraces such diverse media as video, film, installation and photography. The title reflects the consciousness of time that Sedira’s works portray. Several installations in this exhibition are based on her specific interest in collecting, recording and transmitting histories. The evolution of the form, function and impact of images in societies worldwide are evidently part of Sedira’s observation when dealing with archive material. Although Sedira’s work has often been largely identified with postcolonial issues and in particular with her family history, closely linked to Algeria, The exhibition also highlights the manner in which she explores the exponential devastation of the environment through over-production, universal circulation of people and goods. Assembling five multimedia installations and some photographic and film works, the show reveals different forms of change that occurred in the 20th Century: the intense development of the automobile industry in “The End of the Road” (2010) and the development of transportation of freight corresponding to global exploitation and transformation of primary and secondary resources by first world countries as a direct consequence of imperialism in the works “Lighthouse in the Sea of Time” (2010), “Brocken Lens” (2011), “Transmettre en abyme” (2012), the history and the independence of colonialised countries and in particular Algeria in “Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go” (2019) and “Laughter in Hell” (2018)… By her personal implication and her physical presence in the works, their documentary nature is directly linked to her engagement as an artist which she sees as her commitment to society and to democracy. In her early works, Sedira explores the traditional gender roles of Arab women, particularly as passed from mother to daughter. The three-channel video “Mother Tongue” (2002) presents members of three generations discussing childhood in their native languages: the artist in French, her mother in Arabic, and her daughter in English, until communication breaks down between daughter and grandmother, who have no language in common. When Sedira returned to Algeria in the early 2000s, she shifted her lens away from herself and toward a more general landscape of displacement. Since the video project “Saphir” (2006), her visual repertoire has frequently included images of the sea, harbors, and cargo ships, the means by which people and things drift from place to place. Sedira’s 14-screen video installation “Floating Coffins” (2009) (and its photographic complement, “The Death of a Journey”) capture the rusted ships and abandoned tankers that crowd the Mauritanian coast. Just as the sea becomes a metaphorical passageway in the artist’s work, the oral histories of Algerians in times of war have enabled her to evoke present-day situations in other countries. In “Gardiennes d’images” (2010), a work first presented at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Safia Kouaci, the widow of Algerian photographer Mohammed Kouci, talks about her husband’s photographs and the Algerian Revolution. Sedira’s split-screen juxtaposition of black-and-white prints with a saturated close-up of Kouaci blends the documentary nature of the archive with memories of oral history, complicating the notion of who should be the guardians of such images.
Info: Curators: Zineb Sedira and Pia Viewing, Jeu de Paume, 1 place de la Concorde, Paris, Duration: 15/10/19-19/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue 11:00-21:00, Wed-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.jeudepaume.org
