Zineb Sedira was in residence from April 10 to July 10, 2025

 

Zineb Sedira lives and works between Paris, London, and Algiers. Her work explores the personal and the biographical from a multicultural perspective. Sedira investigates themes such as migration, storytelling, and the biases inherent in official narratives. Her practice, which spans photography, sculpture, installation, and performance, is inspired both by her personal history and a broader interest in transmission in all its forms. For Sedira, making art is an act of resistance—against forgetting, hegemony, and the status quo.

 

At the Atelier Calder, Zineb Sedira’s residency project was directly connected to her upcoming solo exhibition at Tate Britain in London (May 2026). She used her time in residence for research work based on cinematic archives and was also able to experiment with various hanging and display methods.

It is from family stories and her personal journey that the artist first drew the substance of her early video works, exploring the paradoxes and intersections of her identity as an Algerian and French woman living in England. Initially staging herself alone, she later included members of her family—her mother, father, or daughter—and eventually external participants. This principle of collaboration, sharing, and dialogue, which Sedira continuously develops, is a hallmark of her creative process.

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In the early 2000s, after a 15-year absence due to the Algerian civil war (the "Black Decade"), the artist traveled across Algeria, reconnecting with its people and landscapes. She rediscovered its architecture, music, literature, and cinema, and developed a new approach that moved beyond family narrative and shifted her work into a more universal dimension. For the first time, she produced images on-site—more complex and less stripped-down.

In this new working method, research, archives, and the gathering of documents, texts, testimonies, photographs, and objects lie at the heart of her creative process. Interpreting the traces of the past through a contemporary lens, preserving memory to pass it on to future generations, reviving events that one has not lived through, unearthing the unspoken, the grey areas, and historical amnesia—these are the challenges her narratives aim to meet, as a modern-day storyteller.

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Zineb Sedira has developed a particular interest in the 1960s and 1970s, decades of utopias marked by African liberation movements and a surge of creativity. In Algeria, this period also represents a golden age of activism, especially in cinema.

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Through this new field of interest—whose influence on her work is increasingly evident—and fueled by a lifelong passion for cinema, Zineb Sedira engages with ideas of otherness, solidarity, and hospitality. These core values run through her project for the French Pavilion. In *Dreams Have No Titles* (2022), she highlights the historical ties between three centers of avant-garde cinema in the 1960s and 70s—Venice, Algiers, and Paris—which gave rise to numerous rich and collaborative co-productions.

 

In 2022, she represented France at the 59th Venice Biennale, she has had numerous major solo exhibitions, including at the Jeu de Paume, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Marseille, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin.

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More informations : https://www.zinebsedira.com