Zineb Sedira
The Wapping Project, London, UK
Zineb Sedira, MiddleSea (2008), still from video. Courtesy Galerie Kamel Mennour
The French-born, London-based artist Zineb Sedira is perhaps best known for pieces such as Mother Tongue (2002), a video triptych showing the generational shift of languages in her family over the course of successive migrations – her Algerian parents’ Arabic, her own French, and her daughter’s English. Showing Sedira speaking to her mother on one screen, the artist speaking to her daughter on another, and Sedira’s mother and daughter unable to converse on a third, this work brought into sharp relief the ineluctable consequences of immigration and the set of intimate means of communication – tender looks and gestures – existing within and outside a shared language. While displacement is still a central theme in MiddleSea (2008), currently showing at The Wapping Project, the biographical element has disappeared. Since her film Saphir (2006), and even before with the video And the Road Goes On (2005), Sedira’s work has taken a new direction; freed from the self-representation of her early works, it has opened up to reach further beyond the personal.
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.
No space could be better suited for the display of this film than the galleries of The Wapping Project, a former hydraulic power station; the metallic equipment that punctuates the venue seems to echo the boat’s maritime gears. This juxtaposition works especially well with the photographs and light boxes displayed in the back rooms. Singling out a detail of the vessel – a bright red handle, the luminously white sirens – they could almost be the continuation or the sublimation of these relics of the building’s industrial past. These shots also further Sedira’s take on abstraction already sketched in MiddleSea. The ‘Another Side’ series (2008) turns the ship’s mundane machinery into enticing compositions of textures and depths of field; in the photographic triptych A View To Sea (2008), the quay of an anonymous port becomes the dynamic diagonals of a Constructivist arrangement. After Sedira’s 2006 exhibition ‘Saphir’ at the Photographers’ Gallery, this show confirms a real turn in the work of an artist, who, without denying her former interests, has developed her practice outside the sometimes narrowing conceptual framework of identity and diaspora.
Coline Milliard
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