To Weave into Words and Films: ZINEB SEDIRA SOLO EXHIBITION

Unveiling a new iteration of her 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition Dreams Have No Titles, Zineb Sedira’s new installation entitled To Weave into Words and Films triangulates between a screening of her film, a series of tapestry works, and a display of lightboxes, all of which reverberate an overarching ethos. The physicality and potentiality of a new space for exhibiting generate a personalized interaction with the project— notably as it makes its debut in North Africa, in a formerly colonized nation: Tunisia. A defining component of the scenography is thus the construction of a fully-fledged movie theatre, which asserts the extensive scope of the artist’s work.

Can the past pin the future in its clasp? Looking forward, we wind up looking backwards, as we presently seek to make sense of or interpret some of the darkest episodes of history. These nostalgic vestiges are non-linear — questionings that are cloaked in time travels. Sedira’s visual trajectory is self-same; the frontiers of temporality here emerge together and intersect. “Archives are part of my heritage, our cultural heritage. We have inherited documents so we can explore and further research them — which can be a way to help us make sense of the past and the present”.[1] Absorbed by her interest in international film co-productions and confluences of Algerian, Italian and French networks of the 60s and 70s, her project reiterates their imperative impact on the struggle for liberation, specifically with regards to Algerian insurgency and, ultimately, postcolonialism. These images are neither perishable nor susceptible to destruction, for they bear forms of a past that fills the gaps of the contemporary. Sedira is devoted to ensuring the restoration of their cultural agency in collective memory through her film. These include sequences from Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, clips from Ennio Lorenzini’s Les Mains Libres —the first documentary film produced in independent Algeria, presumed lost for half a century, only to be recovered by the French-Algerian artist at Aamod (Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico)— and mise-en-abymes of Ettore Scola’s Le Bal, inter alia. Individual and collective footage intertwine, simultaneously emphasizing a heightened intellectual and militant approach that draws on both the artist’s personal history and significant, inconsolable episodes in international history. She diligently reformulates a subjective narrative beyond ossified tales or discourses, by blending two assets of her defining apparatus: a counter-colonial archive and filmmaking, and the hinterland that lies in between.

The factual and the staged, the documentary and the autobiographical are never in a contradistinction in Sedira’s work. From personal snapshots to intimate discussions with friends and intellectual collaborators, these characters are as much part of her fiction as they are part of her reality. In Dreams Have No Titles, the diaristic wittingly bleeds itself into arresting reconstructions of cinematic sets and spaces, looming over them, moving in and out of frame, sporadically. In one shot, Sedira’s figure is superimposed on a film still of the departure of the exiled, the colonized, carrying their luggage, mirroring her own passage as she too is meandering with her suitcases, reenacting her “family script” of displacement and repatriation. These film capsules serve as visual memorabilia through which she seeks to counter, in a first instance, both the historical omission and amnesia to which they were subjected, and, in a second instance, to pay tribute to their associated cultural agents and contributors.

Laying out an index of memory, Sedira in fact inculcates an interrogation of conventional cinematic style and boundaries, to the hilt. The kernel of her research however, which is of ineluctable topicality, remains that of transcultural solidarity. In a conscious effort to salvage and consolidate the latter, she outlines an homage that is not elegiac but rather celebratory, emancipatory even, of her love toward militant “third-World” cinema, which bears “an invitation for us to think about the political and cultural practices that once heralded the period of decolonization”.[2]

The 1960s anti-imperialist cinema of political engagement constituted the intellectual fundamentum of her rigorous research and documentation. “Language is also a place of struggle. The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves—to rewrite, to reconcile, to renew. Our words are not without meaning. They are an action—a resistance”.[3] The spirit of the resistance lives on, and so too should its referent vernacular. Textual material drawn from this militant repertoire is integrated into Sedira’s signature frame; the lightboxes, three illuminated displays reminiscent of the 1960s Holywood billboards adorning the space. Each occupies a wall, with one displaying her film title in French, another featuring a revolutionary a quote from Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, and a third one inserting Sedira’s own words from her film, stating “no matter what, dance, dance, dance to the tempo of life”. Adjacent to this series of lightboxes is a photomontage entitled No Matter What…, enunciating Sedira’s unhalted call for bodily awareness— to move, sway, sashay, to express oneself and exult on the threshold of revolution, invoking the demise of the ominous traces of a stifling colonial repression. In the midst of her sobering critique, she declaims an aesthetics of protest, that is not reduced to slogans, but is rather an embodied resistance of movement and rhythm. This showcased selection amplifies the messages conveyed by the written quotes, declaring the essence of her ideation and embracing “a way of surviving and resisting through text”.[4]

Weaving her familial and national narrative into a postcolonial framework through her film and signage, she subsequently interlaces phrases from The Pan-African Festival of Algiers of 1969 (PANAF)— the momentous gala where intellectuals, radical activists and artists gathered and intermingled. Another notable body of work joining this current exhibition is a series of tapestries handwoven in Tunisia, entitled Les UNES tissées (Festival Pan Africain d’Alger 1969) (2023). These intertextual pieces operate as lexical and woven testimonies of pan-African liberation and solidarity through succinct yet progressive phrases, highlighting the syncretism of artisanat and indigenous practice with discourse. In this light, the inarticulateness of a fabric is confounded by the stitching of militant words by Tunisian women artisans, whom Sedira deems artists in their own right, thus illuminating the duality between art and craft, and by extension, between masculinity and femininity. Perhaps the centrepiece, entitled The Voice You Hear (2024)— a large-scale tapestry — is a precisely intricate form of the preservation of oral history. It is conceived from the extracted sound wave of Sedira’s voiceover in Dreams Have No Titles. “Film is able to reproduce almost the full visual and auditory range of verbal expression…more importantly, the voice…for the voice belongs to the body…a voice emanates actively from within the body itself: it is a product of the body”.[5] Morphing the auditory into a tangible visual product—by means of a physical exercise— the threads and knots conjure up utterances of a specific intonation, tone and cadence, be it of joy or grievance. For Sedira, “in order to get rid of the legacy of colonialism, one ought to go back to the roots of one’s identity and culture: here, that is tapestry, an art form that is also contemporary art”.  

It is a sensory exposure to an irreversible memory— almost deemed irretrievable— that she seeks and hopes to disseminate; a memory that the colonial regimes coerced into extinction and estrangement. To recuperate the narrative(s) by means of cultural production is to remain suspended between historical disclosure and clandestinity, in a constant attempt to disrupt. The adjacent historical and geographical affinities between Tunisia and Algeria bear an incontrovertible exchange in this installation. Emphasizing a collective spirit, our national consciousness will process the visual with a degree of identification, haunted by the phantom of colonialism and, concomitantly, the triumph of emancipation. The representation hence re-signifies a sense of fraternity in the context of engaging with independence struggles “by the same masses who create it, who live it, who inspire each other from across boundaries, give each other spirit and encouragement, and learn from their collective experiences”.[6]