Zineb Sedira – interview | London, 14 December 2022

Sedira discusses her acclaimed French Pavilion for the 2022 Venice Biennale, as well as how the sea became a leitmotif for transnational identity in Can’t You See the Sea Changing?, her solo exhibition at De Le Warr Pavilion and Dundee Contemporary Arts

For Zineb Sedira, the personal is political. Over the course of her 25-year career, Sedira, who describes herself as “a film-maker at heart”, has mined personal history and autobiography to explore postcolonial memory, movement and relationality.

Can’t You See the Sea Changing? is Sedira’s first solo show in a UK public gallery for 12 years. At consecutive coastal locations, the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill and then Dundee Contemporary Arts, the artist presents a body of work that riffs on the sea as passage, border and site of displacement and perpetual motion. At the same time, her project for the French Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Dreams Have No Titles, which received the Jury’s Special Mention, is preparing to travel to Berlin’s Hamburger Banhof.

We meet in Sedira’s south London living room, which is uncannily familiar from models and dioramas that present the artist’s home as a sort of stage set or mise en abyme (an iteration of this work, Way of Life, was presented at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2019, before Venice). Sedira notes that, with its 1960s furniture and vintage Algerian records and posters, the room is a stand-in for the sort of discursive spaces that allowed for debate, collaboration and, crucially, friendship, during the liberation movements of the 60s in Algeria.

Zineb Sedira: Can’t You See the Sea Changing?
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea
24 September 2022 – 8 January 2023
and
Dundee Contemporary Arts
29 April – 6 August 2023

Dreams Have No Titles (from the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022)
Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
24 February – 30 July 2023

Interview by AMIE CORRY
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY