Programs Calendar Films

Saphir contrasts Sedira's re-encounter with the sights and sounds of Algiers with an awareness that while she, like many other people from France, is enjoying her return to the city after the Algerian Civil War, some of its other residents, disenchanted young men in particular, often dream of escape across the water to Europe.
‘In some respects, Saphir re-enacts the story of Sedira’s father leaving for France and his young wife forced to remain in Algeria. On a split screen, a male and female actor are positioned inside and outside a 1930s’ French-built, art deco hotel called Es Safir, never acknowledging one another. The central characters, however, are the port with its faded grandeur and decrepit colonial architecture, and the sea itself. The sonic atmosphere of the harbour traffic signals the general restlessness: seagulls squawking, horns blaring, people talking, maritime machinery clanking, bikes revving. The Tariq Ibn Ziyad ferry that travels between Algiers and Marseilles, moves into view, paralleling the hotel as a place of transitory dreams, held under a veneer of glamour that belongs indelibly to another era.’ Cherry Smith

Zineb Sedira is a London-based artist who works between Algiers, London and Paris. She has exhibited both in the UK and internationally - at the Venice Biennale (2001), Tate Britain, London (2002), ICP Triennial in NY (2003), Centre Pompidou & Hayward Gallery, (2005), British Art Show 06 (2006) and has had solo exhibitions at the Cornerhouse, Manchester, The Photographers’ Gallery and The Wapping Project, London amongst others. Further Solo shows in 2009 are planned at the Pori Museum, Finland, and in 2010, at the BildMuseet, Sweden and the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseilles. Her work can be found in the public collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, the Tate, Arts Council England, the MUMOK - Vienna, Victoria and Albert Museum and the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Museum, amongst others.