Zineb Sedira


Zineb Sedira is a London-based Franco-Algerian feminist photographer and video artist, best known for work exploring the human relationship to geography.
Sedira was shortlisted for the 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.

Early life and education

Zineb Sedira was born on April 1, 1963, to Abdul Rahman Sedira and Oumessaad Rouabah, immigrants from Algeria, in the Parisian suburb of Gennevilliers. She moved to England in 1986.
Sedira received a BA in Critical Fine Art Practice at London's Central Saint Martins, then earned an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1997. She later spent five years doing research at the Royal College of Art.

Career

Sedira's early work focused on images of women in the Muslim world, featuring photographs of her mother and her daughter. Watching her mother don the haik upon arrival in Algiers had a significant impact on Sedira. "I remember as soon as we got off the plane and arrived at her home, she would open the case and put it out," she said in 2013. "She would change into it. She would become it." Her video, Mother Tongue shows herself, her daughter, and her mother speaking in their "mother tongues", French, English, and Arabic respectively, with Sedira acting as the linguistic conduit between her mother and her daughter who don't have a language in common. In September 2020 it was announced that Sedira will represent France at the 59th Venice Biennale, in 2022. She created an installation named “dreams have no titles” where she converted the French pavilion into a film studio and a screening room paying tribute to the 1960s and 1970s militant films and referencing also to her own family’s history as immigrants in France.

Exhibitions

Collections

Sedira's work is held in the following public collections:

Awards