Zineb Sedira (b. 1963 Paris, France) utilises the mediums of photography, film, video, object making, performance and installation. For over 25 years, her practice has addressed themes of history, migration and storytelling. 

Solo exhibitions: Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, 2023), Dundee Contemporary Arts (Dundee, 2023), De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill-on-Sea, 2022), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Scottsdale, 2021), Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2019), Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (Valencia, 2019), Beirut Art Center (Lebanon, 2018) and Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2010). 

Institutional group exhibitions: Kunsthausbaselland (Basel, 2022), The Photographers’ Gallery (London, 2021), Pompidou Centre (Paris, 2020), Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, 2019), Whitechapel Gallery (London, 2019), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (Holland, 2018) and Tate Britain (London, 2013). 

Biennials and triennials: the Gwangju Biennale (2023); Venice Biennale (2001, 2011, 2022);  the Folkestone Triennial (2011); Sharjah Biennale (2003 and 2007); and  the triennial for photography and video at the Institute of Contemporary Photography in New York (2003). 

Sedira’s film Dreams Have No Titles (2022) was awarded the Special Mention of the Jury at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. In 2023, it was screened at the High Line in New York and at the Labia Theatre in Cape Town and went on display at TATE Britain in London as part of a rehang of the permanent collection. It will have its UK premiere at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in Spring 2024.  The work will tour to the Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi, in Autumn 2024.  Forthcoming is a significant solo exhibition at The Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon in February 2025.

2023
Unbind, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Dreams Have No Titles (film), The High Line, NY 
Une séparation, Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest, France
Deep Blue, Porto Photography Biennial ’23, Porto, Portugal
British Art rehang of Tate Britain’s Collection Displays, Tate Britain, London, UK

2022
7  WINDS, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland
For a Brief Moment […] Several Time: Latifa Echakhch & Zineb Sedira, Kunsthausbaselland, Basel, Switzerland

2021
Alger Archipel des libertés, Frac Centre-Val de Loire, Orléans, France
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2021, Deutsche Börse’s headquarters in Eschborn, Frankfurt
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2021, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, UK
We Are History, Terrace Rooms, Somerset House, London, UK
The Stomach and the Port, Liverpool Biennial 2021, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, UK
Ce qui s’oublie et ce qui reste, Africa2020 @ Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris
Traducciones rioplatenses, MUNTREF,  Museum of Immigration, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Swirl of Words, Swirl of Worlds, Shoreditch Library. Organised by PEER, London

2020
Invisible Wounds: Landscape and Memory in Photography, Graves Gallery  at University of Sheffield, UK

Zineb Sedira: Dreams Have No Titles
September 12 – November 2, 2023
On the High Line at 14th Street

In 2022, Zineb Sedira won special mention at the Venice Biennale for Dreams Have No Titles, her presentation for the French Pavilion. A multi-layered installation, performance, and film, Sedira’s pavilion told her own story of falling in love with film—first watching Italian epics and Spaghetti Westerns in the cinema Les Variétés with her father, which eventually leads her to visit the Algerian Cinémathèque, Algiers’ rich film archive. For the film, Sedira restaged scenes from many of her favorite famous films, including surprising collaborations and solidarities across Italy, France, and Algeria during the country’s fight for independence. Dreams Have No Titles addresses a major turning point in the history of cultural, intellectual and avant-garde production of the 1960s and 1970s in France, Italy, and Algeria. Her contribution also serves as a cautionary tale about the failure of an emancipatory promise which, for many people, remains an unfulfilled dream.

Dreams Have No Titles was produced by the French Institute and presented in the French Pavilion, on the occasion of the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in collaboration with the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, with the support of Mennour, Paris. The presentation of Dreams Have No Titles on the High Line marks both the first exhibition of the film after the 59th Venice Biennale, and its premiere in North America.

Zineb Sedira, Dreams Have No Titles is organized by Melanie Kress, Former Curator of High Line Art. The presentation of Dreams Have No Titles on the High Line is courtesy of the artist and Mennour, Paris.

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Zineb Sedira’s MiddleSea is a single screen film installation, shot on super 16mm colour film, and a series of light boxes. Sedira explores a traveller’s poetic and dream-like journey by sea. A man wanders in a somnambulant state, hypnotized by the immensity of the horizon, alone amidst a plate of water.

"MiddleSea is undoubtedly the most accomplished work to date in this new phase of Sedira’s practice. Set on a ship cruising from Algiers to Marseilles, it unravels like a ballade, a visual meditation on the state of transit. The camera wanders over the white decks, sometimes catching the breathtaking immensity of the horizon, sometimes, in a series of verging-on-abstract shots, capturing the ethereal beauty of the tiniest details, the sea water caught in the deck’s rusted paint or the droplets in the boat’s wake. A man, alone, rambles in the empty corridors of the deserted vessel. He seems to be waiting, caught in a bubble of suspended time. It’s the Mediterranean, but it could be anywhere. The sky, the sea, the ship and the lonely figure, function like the schematic elements of an endlessly repeated story of departure and ever-delayed returns. The soundtrack, composed by Mikhail Karikis – a deft amalgam of location recordings, instrumental snippets and sound collages – comes to disturb the film’s almost too-smooth aesthetic. Combining unnervingly high pitches with the heavy breathing of the ship’s engine, it reinforces the overruling feeling of melancholic uneasiness and gives to MiddleSea a depth inaccessible to the visual alone."

Coline Milliard, Frieze, 2008

In “Dreams Have No Titles”, the artist addresses a major turning point in the history of cultural, intellectual and avant-garde production of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond, in France, Italy and Algeria especially. She focuses on a repertoire of remarkable cinematographic co- productions and filmmaking, in particular activist ones, which had an impact on postcolonial movements.

During several visits to the archives of the Algerian Cinémathèque, she continued to mine the country’s incredible film heritage, which hardly ever gets a mention in the history of the cinematographic avant-gardes. Post- independence cinema in France, Italy and Algeria adhered to the so-called “Third-World” values and aesthetics, which amounted to a true revolution on the big screen. Throughout her life, Zineb Sedira felt close to this militant and anti-colonial movement inspired by the Cuban model, showing a political courage that she considers to be an important manifestation of solidarity at that time, and which she hopes to reactivate today.

FRIEZE – Zineb Sedira’s Films Recreate Radical Political Alliances of the Past
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APOLLO MAGAZINE – Reel life – how Zineb Sedira found herself through film
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FINANCIAL TIMES – Zineb Sedira, Whitechapel Gallery review — ravishing recreations of film sets charm and provoke
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SUNDAY TIMES – The joy of revolution
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THE ART NEWSPAPER – A Brush with Zineb Sedira
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THE GUARDIAN – Zineb Sedira: Dreams Have No Titles review – magic moments in the bar that can take you anywhere
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