Zineb Sedira - Can't You See The Sea Changing?

Zineb Sedira: Can't You See The Sea Changing?
September 24, 2022–January 8, 2023

Working across photography, installation and film, Zineb 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. Spanning both of the De La Warr Pavilion’s galleries, Can’t You See the Sea Changing? is Sedira’s first exhibition in a UK public gallery for over 12 years and focuses on her ongoing investigation into the conditions of transnational trade, identity and migrant consciousness in a post-colonial context, within which the sea is a recurring motif.

Throughout her career, Sedira 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 her varying approaches to storytelling, Sedira interrogates what she refers to as ‘spaces where mobility expires’, or the (in)ability 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.

Beginning from Sedira’s fascination with the sea as an enigmatic yet geopolitically charged space, as well as the coastal context of the De La Warr Pavilion, the exhibition spans a period from 2008 to the present day and brings together photography, installation, film and archival material in a constellation of seafaring traces. Images of imposing lighthouses, abandoned shipwrecks, and eroded rocks are layered with the memories, daily experiences and tragic deaths of those who have moved across surrounding seas. By highlighting these human narratives in her work, Sedira builds an oceanic archive that unearths stories of migration and movement that would otherwise remain invisible, whilst demonstrating the power of images to reconstruct our understanding of history. Through the artist’s analytical eye, the exhibition draws upon her ongoing exploration of archival processes and the different ‘windows’ or thresholds that they can open up.

Can’t You See the Sea Changing? is a collaboration between De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, and Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), where the exhibition will be presented in spring 2023.