Zineb Sedira in Africultures

Africultures profiled the work of Zineb Sedira today in an excellent article, "Zineb Sedira: Mémoire vive" by Julie Crenn. I had the honor of meeting Zineb in January at the France-Algeria: Visualising a (Post-) Colonial Relationship conference in Manchester, UK. Her 2003 works "Mother, Father, and I" and "Retelling Histories" merge family and national histories (and painful testimonials) tracked through multi-media installations.


I plan to analyze Sedira's project alongside Leïla Sebbar's Mes Algéries en France and subsequent visual texts. As Crenn says of Sedira, and as I've written about Sebbar:
Sedira procède à des allers retours dans ce vaste patrimoine qui est le sien. En exil, l'artiste se cherche, jusqu'à revenir en Algérie en 2002. Un retour aux sources inévitable et nécessaire, après quinze années d'absence. Depuis, les paysages de son pays d'origine et les Algériens sont les sujets récurrents de son œuvre.
This aller-retour is at the heart of my work on repetition in return narratives. While many pieces of Pied-Noir written returns are primarily an "aller simple," what happens when the memory is brought back again and again through the visual? The upcoming exposition in Manchester based on the "North to North" project reworks the same idea. Check out New Cartographies: Algeria-France-UK in which Zineb Sedira will be a featured artist in 2011.