Zineb Sedira: Saphir
29th September-26th November

An exhibition of photographs and a new video installation by the London-based French/Algerian artist, Zineb Sedira. Sedira’s artistic practice is informed by her French, Algerian and British identities. She employs video and photography to investigate issues of representation, language, memory, displacement and landscape to engage with issues of nomadism, migrancy and notions of homeland.

Zineb Sedira interview from the Lebanon's Daily Star:

LONDON: Migration, memory and the experience of a ruptured city filtered through lived experience and the fading remembrances of a life in exile. The themes explored in Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira's latest exhibition, entitled "Saphir" and on view at the Photographers' Gallery in London through November 26, will surely resonate with Lebanese audiences.

In a series of 12 photographs and a two-screen video installation depicting contemporary Algiers, the London-based artist delves into the ambivalent relationship that exists between naturalized emigrants and the country they identify as their "homeland."

Sedira approaches her subject, the city itself, through the nostalgic-yet-distant lens that is unique to the diaspora citizen. Algiers is a city in transition, shaped by the residue of French colonialism and the modern currents of globalization, torn between the conflicting desires to confront its violent past and shrug off the legacy of a long and undeclared civil war.

In 2001, Sedira, who grew up in France, returned to Algeria after a 15-year absence. She found the country radically different from the one she had last seen in 1985. Sedira has lived in London since she was 22. She says her peripatetic lifestyle and her sense of dislocation from Algeria have been key to her maturation as an artist.

"I was always doing work about Algeria," she says, speaking on a rainy evening in London last week. "But before it was from a French and British context, and I used my parents a lot," she adds, in reference to the sources of inspiration that marked her early work.

"There is no Algerian art presence in the UK compared to France," she explains, "and I felt quite isolated. Perhaps my work was too emotional in France. By displacing myself to the UK, I was able to be more objective."

When Sedira finally "rediscovered" Algeria, the focus of her work shifted from the intimate and the personal (for which video art offered an ideal medium) to the markedly more universal (accentuated through landscape photography).

"Silent Sight," from 2000, for example, offered a video account of Sedira's childhood memory of not recognizing her own mother when she was veiled. "Mother Tongue," from the following year, discussed her sense of disconnection from the Arabic language.

The diaspora condition remains as a through-line from Sedira's earlier work to "Saphir." But this time around, she is approaching it from a broader and more geopolitical perspective, casting her eye on the architecture of Algiers over her own recollections in life.

The crumbling, resilient French-colonial buildings surrounding the port of Algiers are the subjects of Sedira's panoramic prints, emblematic of Algeria's decaying beauty and its turbulent past. Some of the compositions frame men as they go about their contemporary lives in a city of dilapidated yet majestic architecture. All of the images on view share a common backdrop - the Mediterranean, which Sedira describes as a measure of Algeria's physical and metaphorical distance from France.

The video installation at the core of the exhibition depicts a man and a woman who never meet. They too seem to function as symbols of the gritty, seductive and ensnaring qualities of Algiers.

The loose plot follows a man in his late thirties as he wanders through the city, seemingly without purpose.

The camera traces his melancholic gaze to a series of oil tankers dotting the horizon, but Sedira skillfully refuses to identify the man's aspirations.

"I didn't want the audience to see him as someone who wanted to leave," she says. "I wanted to leave it open because some young men dream of leaving but some men want to stay.

"You feel there is a gap because so many people who left during the war are coming back to rediscover their country with real interest," she adds. "There is a younger generation who is hungry and they want to stay. But there are thousands of young Algerians who are desperate to leave."

The woman in Sedira's video installation walks up and down the stairs of the Safir Hotel, one of the many formerly grand landmarks of colonial Algiers. She stares out the window of a now shabby hotel room to the sea. Their common gaze toward the horizon is the only thread connecting the two characters.

A jarring audio reel plays throughout the 18-minute video - the sounds of oil rigs, traffic and global commerce interrupting romantic images of landscape and provincial life, "showing the reality of the city," Sedira says.

Though Sedira never reveals the motive of either character, there is an undeniable sense that they are trapped in the city. Planes fly overhead, birds swoop past boats in the port, the camera pauses on empty hallways and staircases - each image reminds viewers of the characters' restricted mobility.

Sedira is aware that as a French citizen she has a freedom of movement that local Algerians do not. She is equally aware of the ambiguous consequences of globalization in Algeria. The country is more liberal and open now than it ever was before, she says. But at the same time, 70 percent of its population of 33 million is under the age of 25. The unemployment rate hovers around 33 percent.

Though she often considers moving back to Algeria and maintains an apartment in the capital, Sedira says the nascent local contemporary art scene in Algiers is still too young to embrace multi-disciplinary video artists. Algeria's art schools need updating, she adds, and university faculties need to move beyond traditional training in sculpture and painting. Beyond that, Sedira says she senses reluctance among most local artists to confront the violent legacy of the Algerian civil war (bracketed in time by the military's decision to cancel a round of parliamentary elections in early 1992, after Islamist parties made a strong showing, and a general amnesty law for all who fought that was put in place earlier this year).

"Sometimes I feel like too many contemporary artists in Beirut focus their work on the Civil War, but on the other hand, in Algeria, no one is doing work on the war. Maybe it's too soon for us," she offers. Maybe "in another ten years artists will talk about the war."

Answering the nostalgic lure of an unknown Algiers

Zineb Sedira's "Saphir" is on view at the Photographers' Gallery in London through November 26. For more information, please call +44 207 831 1772.

Zineb Sedira - Official Web site