LONDON — When the Venice Art Biennale opens its doors to the public this weekend, France will be represented for the first time by an artist of Algerian descent.
Zineb Sedira is that artist, and her appointment is historic in several respects. Only a handful of women artists have been exhibited by the French Pavilion since it opened in 1912. More unusually, Ms. Sedira is a child of working-class immigrants who settled in France in the early 1960s, right around the time Algeria ended about 130 years of French colonial rule. Her community has suffered from racism and discrimination for decades.
How does it feel to represent France in such a context?
“It’s a great opportunity to pave the way for other artists like me,” said Ms Sedira in an interview at her south London studio, which overlooks a busy road and is full of visual retrospectives to post-independence Algeria. . “Better now than never.”
She attributed her selection to the fact that the selection committee of the French Pavilion was gender-balanced and diverse for the first time. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t be attacked, criticized by a certain group of people,” she said. “It will be painful.”
To a certain extent it already is. In January 2020, when her name was announced as representing France at the Venice Biennale, French website Causeur wrote an editorial in which she demanded that France withdraw the nomination because Ms Sedira had refused to participate in an exhibition in Israel in 2017 and was a “fervent supporter” of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, or BDS, which, in solidarity with the Palestinians, seeks to exert economic and political pressure on Israel. Franco-Jewish groups and personalities such as the gallery owner Jacqueline Frydman and the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy were shocked at the Venice appointment until Ms. Sedira responded with a public statement that she had never boycotted the 2017 exhibition, that she did not support the BDS movement. and that she would not step aside as the artist representing France.
Mrs. Sedira, 59, was born in the Parisian suburb of Gennevilliers, one of nine children of an Algerian factory worker and a housewife who migrated to France and with whom she has always been close. As a little girl with ribbons in her hair, she recalled accompanying her father to the local movie theater to watch spaghetti westerns, big-budget Hollywood productions like ‘Cleopatra’ and Egyptian melodramas.
As a teenager, her favorite cinema became the Cinéma Jean Vigo, also in Gennevilliers, showing both arthouse and militant, anti-colonialist films. (She held her first press conference there in the French Pavilion in February and will recreate the cinema in Venice.)
Growing up in Gennevilliers was tough. During her childhood and adolescence, Ms Sedira said, she witnessed the disrespect for her parents and protected them as best she could. She snapped back at market vendors who addressed them with the familiar “tu” for “you” instead of the formal “vous,” or at passers-by who greeted them with racist insults.
After completing a photography course, Ms. Sedira moved to Paris at the age of 18, started mixing with artists and musicians and then moved back to London. There she studied at the best art schools – Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art. Shortly after graduating, she had her first exhibition – at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. It consisted of a room covered with Moroccan-style tiles with geometric patterns, showing four generations of women in her family, including herself.
“Coming to England helped me a lot, because I suddenly distanced myself from this kind of pathological relationship with Algeria,” she explained. “I had a different view of French colonial history” which was “more intellectual and less emotional, so I became less emotional about this kind of racism and could explain it”, but not “accept it”.
She settled in Brixton, South London (where she still lives) and befriended artists such as Sonia Boyce, who is representing Britain at this year’s Venice Biennale – the first black British woman to do so.
In a telephone interview, Ms. Boyce described Ms. Sedira as “a party girl” who was “very sociable, very good at bringing people together.” Ms Boyce also said Ms Sedira was “very clever at being able to distil what is happening politically and culturally around us.”
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Ms. Sedira mainly works in film and photography. She creates art that is personal, often beginning as a dialogue with one or more family members, and reflecting on her multiple identities: British, French, Algerian, Berber, Arab, African.
“I am a product of colonialism because I was born in France but should have been in Algeria,” she said in the interview. “If my parents hadn’t been colonized, I’d be here today. I am a legacy of all the stories and all the suffering.”
“I think there are always traces,” she said. “I’m making it a rich experience because I don’t want to keep talking about how awful it was.”
Mrs. Sedira’s work from Venice, ‘Dreams Have No Titles’, will be a 25-minute ‘kaleidoscope’, a film within a film that will be a loosely poetic evocation of her life. It will feature clips from films produced by Algeria in the post-colonial era, remakes of scenes from those films and behind-the-scenes footage of its own artistic process. The pavilion will also feature sets and scenery, such as a reconstruction of her Brixton home, a version of a work she showed in 2019 at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris.
Kamel Mennour, gallery owner of Ms Sedira, also a child of Algerian immigrants, said the fact that a woman of Algerian descent would represent France this year was “an extraordinary signal” because “we need flag bearers who can show us the way” .
“Nationalism always has a patriotic, inward-looking aspect,” he said. “Zineb opens up the range of possibilities.”
