Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go, 2021

Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go,2021

Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go was first shown in 2019 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and commissioned by Jeu de Paume, Paris, France; IVAM, Valencia, Spain; Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal; and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden. This work is inspired by the 1969 Pan-African Festival of Algiers—a key historical event that marked Algeria’s important role in various liberation movements in Africa along with a worldwide 1960s political, anti-imperialist, utopian consciousness—and the eponymous William Klein documentary film of the event. Re-created for a United States audience during the turbulent year of 2020, this installation is sensitive to the overwhelming global political movement of #BlackLivesMatter, along with protests and riots denouncing racial injustice, police brutality, and a resurgence of interest in Black liberation movements.

Way of Life (Scene 3), 2021

This is a life-size diorama that re-creates Sedira’s own London living room in the multicultural neighborhood of Brixton, which is now her home. The artist’s private space is replicated and made available to the museum audience. Replete with 1960s furniture and the artist's personal objects, such as statues, photographs, posters, books, and records. The central couch invites viewers to sit and watch a 2019 video that features Sedira’s friend Nadira Lagounne, an Algerian scholar and curator who recounts her experience of the Pan-African Festival at the impressionable age of 17. As the centerpiece of the Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go (2021) installation, Way of Life performs an important role—it is not just a stage but a “living” living room, a place where the audience is invited to do more than function passively, but to bear witness to a radical past and see, watch, and engage with ideas of protest, liberation, and revolution. It is, in this sense, a “Liberation Living Room.”

Way of Life (Scene 3), 2021

Way of Life (Scene 3), 2021

mise-en-scène (Scene 1), 2019

This almost 9-minute projection includes found, discarded, and unused footage, photograms, and film stills that the artist scanned, cut, and spliced together to create a one 8mm film. The fissures, scratches, and erosion visible in this archive of militant cinema create a sense of the physical, material films, turning this section of Standing (2021) into a kind of archaeology: the artist reconstructs a forgotten past through overlooked fragments, and uses the archive in such a way that it points to a utopian future.

Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go, 2021

For a Brief Moment the World Was on Fire…, 2021

This series of eight color photomontages begin as collages the artist makes in her studio by assembling found images from countercultural, anti-colonial, and liberation-movement newspapers and pamphlets to activate content created during a time of robust cultural upheaval and counter-cultural change. This is hybridized terrain, and Sedira's collected and sampled images construct associations and connections that may otherwise not be evident. Additionally, in We Have Come Back, Sedira collected, curated, and assembled a medley of vinyl records containing popular protest songs from the 1960s and ‘70s. They represent radical militant movements for liberation from colonialism and imperialism, internationalist agitprop. for civil rights and gender equality, and the political engagement of musicians of that era.

We Have Come Back, 2021

This series of eight color photomontages begin as collages the artist makes in her studio by assembling found images from countercultural, anti-colonial, and liberation-movement newspapers and pamphlets to activate content created during a time of robust cultural upheaval and counter-cultural change. This is hybridized terrain, and Sedira's collected and sampled images construct associations and connections that may otherwise not be evident. Additionally, in We Have Come Back, Sedira collected, curated, and assembled a medley of vinyl records containing popular protest songs from the 1960s and ‘70s. They represent radical militant movements for liberation from colonialism and imperialism, internationalist agitprop. for civil rights and gender equality, and the political engagement of musicians of that era.

We Have Come Back (scene 4), 2021

Mother Tongue, 2002

In her groundbreaking 2002 Mother Tongue video triptych, the artist Zineb Sedira, her mother, and her daughter exchange childhood memories in their native languages: French, Arabic, and English respectively. Sedira’s video work Mother Tongue looks at three generations of the artist’s family, each part of the African diaspora, each communicating in their own “mother tongue,” but unable to communicate directly through words. This video, which serves as a poetic documentary on migration, displacement, and oral transmission reveals bonds that are subtle yet resilient.

End of the Road, 2010

This 16mm film shows a journey of wrecked cars piled up like corpses as they move through a British junkyard creating a dystopian image of cultural loss, one of Zineb Sedira’s preoccupations. In her voice-over words: “the death of these modes of transportation is a symbol of rupture, disorientation, loss of points of reference and fragmentation experienced when traveling, a physical disaster associated with the existentialist idea of drifting with all its socio-economic, cultural, and environmental.” Yet she finds a trace of hope in the process of ruin, as in a photograph of two rusted, half-destroyed tankers leaning together, as if for support. She titles the image “The Lovers.”