Artist Zineb Sedira, Whose Astute Video Installations Explore National Identity, Will Represent France at the 2021 Venice Biennale

France has chosen Zineb Sedira, the Paris-born
Algerian artist best known for her haunting photographs and video
installations, as its official artist for the 2021 Venice Biennale.
This marks the fourth time that a woman will represent the nation,
following Annette Messager (2005), Sophie Calle (2007), and Laure
Prouvost (2019). Sedira is also the first artist of Algerian
descent to be chosen for the prestigious commission, according to
French media. 

Born in 1963 in Paris, Sedira lives in London and
works between London, Paris, and Algiers. She is known for her
serene, profound work that explores hefty questions about identity,
memory, geography, colonialism, and oral history. Combining the
personal and the political, her work draws on her experience of
growing up in Paris as the daughter of Algerian immigrants and of
residing and bringing up her own daughter in multicultural Brixton
in south London. 

Her early work focuses most explicitly on her own
personal history. The video Mother, Father and
I (2005) explores why her parents chose to leave Algeria
shortly after it won independence from France in 1962 and move to
France, where they were again confronted by French rule and
racism.

In another video, Mother
Tongue (2002), three generations of Sedira’s family—her
daughter, her mother, and herself—try to speak to one another in
English, Arabic, and French. As Sedira’s daughter and her
grandmother fail to communicate, Sedira acts as interpreter.

“How do you tell your identity when your identity
is quite complex, perhaps painful at times, but also very rich?”
Sedira said in an interview filmed by the Guggenheim Museum in
2017.

Subsequent works, such as Saphir (2006)
and Shipwrecks, the Death of a Journey (2008), took a more
poetic, less documentary approach and were inspired less by her
personal life and more by the landscape and seascape of Algeria and
Mauritania. Her 2011 video installation Lighthouse in the
Sea of Time traces two lighthouses built in Algeria
during French rule in the late 19th century. 

After arriving in Britain in her early 20s,
Sedira studied at Central Saint Martins and earned her MFA from the
Slade School of Art. In 2015, she was nominated for the Prix Marcel
Duchamp, France’s most prestigious contemporary art prize. Her work
was also included in an exhibition of African and African Diaspora
artists at the 2001 Venice Biennale,
“Authentic/Ex-centric.”

Most recently, Sedira had a solo show at the Jeu de
Paume photography center in Paris; later this year, her work will
be exhibited at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon and at
Dallas Contemporary.

Sedira is represented by Kamel Mennour of
Paris and London and by The Third Line in Dubai. Her work has been
widely collected by institutions including the Centre Pompidou, the
Tate, the Mumok in Vienna, the
Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, and the Sharjah Art
Museum.

The post Artist Zineb Sedira, Whose Astute Video
Installations Explore National Identity, Will Represent France at
the 2021 Venice Biennale appeared first on artnet
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