Zineb Sedira Is Expected to Become the First Artist of Algerian Descent to Represent France at the Venice Biennale in 2021

France has chosen Zineb Sedira, the Paris-born
Algerian artist best known for her haunting photographs and video
installations, to represent the nation at the 2021 Venice Biennale,
according to the French newspaper Le Monde. The news
has not been officially confirmed by France’s culture ministry,
which told Artnet News that the announcement would be made later
this week.

Sedira’s selection would mark the fourth time that
a woman would represent the nation, following Annette Messager
(2005), Sophie Calle (2007), and Laure Prouvost (2019). Sedira is
also the first artist of Algerian descent to be chosen for the
prestigious commission, according to French media. 

Zineb Sedira’s work “is a form of political and ethical
engagement that we need today to remember the social struggles of
women and men who constitute our history,” Pia Viewing, the curator
of Sedira’s recent solo show, “A Brief Moment,” at the Jeu de Paume
photography center in Paris, told Artnet News.

Born in 1963 in Paris, Sedira lives in London and
works between London, Paris, and Algiers. She is known for her
serene, profound work that explores hefty questions about identity,
memory, geography, colonialism, and oral history. Combining the
personal and the political, her work draws on her experience of
growing up in Paris as the daughter of Algerian immigrants and of
residing and bringing up her own daughter in multicultural Brixton
in south London. 

Her early work focuses most explicitly on her own
personal history. The video Mother, Father and
I (2005) explores why her parents chose to leave Algeria
shortly after it won independence from France in 1962 and move to
France, where they were again confronted by French rule and
racism.

In another video, Mother
Tongue (2002), three generations of Sedira’s family—her
daughter, her mother, and herself—try to speak to one another in
English, Arabic, and French. As Sedira’s daughter and her
grandmother fail to communicate, Sedira acts as interpreter.

“How do you tell your identity when your identity
is quite complex, perhaps painful at times, but also very rich?”
Sedira said in an interview filmed by the Guggenheim Museum in
2017.

Subsequent works, such as Saphir (2006)
and Shipwrecks, the Death of a Journey (2008), took a more
poetic, less documentary approach and were inspired less by her
personal life and more by the landscape and seascape of Algeria and
Mauritania. Her 2011 video installation Lighthouse in the
Sea of Time traces two lighthouses built in Algeria
during French rule in the late 19th century. 

After arriving in Britain in her early 20s,
Sedira studied at Central Saint Martins and earned her MFA from the
Slade School of Art. In 2015, she was nominated for the Prix Marcel
Duchamp, France’s most prestigious contemporary art prize. Her work
was also included in an exhibition of African and African Diaspora
artists at the 2001 Venice Biennale,
“Authentic/Ex-centric.”

Later this year, Sedira’s work will be exhibited at
the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon and at Dallas
Contemporary. Her work has been widely
collected by institutions including the Centre Pompidou, the Tate,
the Mumok in Vienna, the Mathaf:
Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, and the Sharjah Art
Museum.

The artist is represented by Kamel Mennour of
Paris and London and by The Third Line in Dubai. Sedira and her
galleries did not immediately respond to a request for
comment. 

The post Zineb Sedira Is Expected to Become the First Artist
of Algerian Descent to Represent France at the Venice Biennale in
2021 appeared first on artnet News.