Zineb Sedira: Can't You See the Sea Changing?

29 Apr-6 Aug 2023

Overview

This major solo exhibition by Zineb Sedira, developed in collaboration with De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, will be her first project in UK public galleries for 12 years.

Beginning from Sedira’s fascination with the sea as an enigmatic yet geopolitically charged space, as well as the coastal contexts of Dundee Contemporary Arts and De La Warr Pavilion, the exhibition spans a period from 2008 to the present day and brings together photography, installation, film and archival material.

Sedira draws upon her personal history and close connection to Algeria, France and the UK to explore ideas of identity, gender, environment and collective memory. Throughout her career, she has become a leading voice in addressing the question of what it means to live between different cultures, often bringing together autobiographical narration, fiction and documentary genres. Through these varying approaches to storytelling, Sedira interrogates what she refers to as ‘spaces where mobility expires’, exploring the ability or otherwise of individuals to depart, return, escape, or exist in transit between certain lands and identities. Whilst her narratives are embedded with histories of migration and exile, particularly in relation to her home countries of Algeria and France, through her work Sedira considers what it means to be transported through visionary acts of imagination, acts that carry us to different places through the merging of past and present time frames.  

The title of the exhibition, Can’t You See the Sea Changing? is especially timely and directly evocative of rapidly shifting coastlines and geopolitical borders, where the legacy of colonialism and greed has created a climate crisis that sees shores swallowed by the sea, and bodies of water dry up inland. This rapid change has caused the forced migration of many communities, who now leave behind ancestral lands in search of security and resources. Sedira nods to the impossibility of this situation, where the people most affected are left behind to continue to produce and export to those who feel they have no need to fear the rising tide. 

About the artist: 

Zineb Sedira (born 1963, Paris), lives in London and works between Algeria, Paris, and London. Recent solo exhibitions include Bildmuseet (Umeå, Sweden, 2021), SMoCA (Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art) (US, 2021), Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2019), IVAM‑Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (Spain, 2019), Beirut Art Center (Lebanon, 2018), Sharjah Art Foundation Art Spaces (UAE, 2018), Art On the Underground (London, 2016). She has previously shown in institutions such as Tate Britain, Centre Pompidou, Mori Museum, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Musée d’Art Moderne of Algiers, Brooklyn Museum, Mathaf – Arab Museum of Modern Art, Gwangju Museum of Art, and MMK Museum für Mordern Kunst, as well as in biennials and triennials, including the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2011), the Triennial for photography and video at the Institute of Contemporary Photography in New York (2003), the Sharjah Biennale (2003 and 2007), the Folkestone Triennial (2011), New Orleans’ international art exhibition (2017) and the Liverpool Biennial (2021). 

Sedira represented France at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022) and was awarded a special mention for her exhibition titled Dreams Have No Titles.

Artists