The three issues of the periodical charting the artistic journey of Zineb Sedira in the run up to her presentation for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), gathered in a box set.
Red, green, and blue, these three color-coded issues chart the artistic journey of Zineb Sedira, culminating in her presentation for the French Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia 2022. A cross between a newspaper and a magazine paying tribute to such innovative Maghrebi publications of the 1970s as
Les 2 écrans or
Souffles, this generically hybrid publication is conceived as an alternative to the catalogue in the traditional sense.
Each issue refers to a city—Algiers, Paris, and Venice—that has played an important part in Sedira's life and artistic formation. Sub-titled "
Forms of Desire," "Tools of Agitation," and "Conserve, Show, Restage, Revivify" respectively, the three issues effectively reproduce the structure of a screenplay in three acts: set-up, confrontation, and resolution. They function as a space of encounter that brings together members of Zineb Sedira's extended artistic and intellectual family. In featuring a plurality of voices, the journal echoes the networks of solidarity forged by artists, filmmakers, and cultural practitioners in the 1960s and 1970s—a period of prolific co-production between Algeria, Italy, and France—in an effort to create an independent political standpoint beyond and outside of past colonial structures.
Replete with artistic, cinematic, musical, archival, and political references, the three issues shed light on Zineb Sedira's artistic practice, the processes that underpin her work, and the inspirations that have nourished it. They offer a glimpse behind the scenes of her exhibition at the French Pavilion.
Born 1963 in Paris, Zineb Sedira lives in London and works between Algiers, Paris and London. Her work focuses on social and political evolutions in modern societies and issues of
displacement and memory in contemporary history. Highlighting her specific interest in archives and in the collecting, recording and transmission of histories, her work has frequently been identified with
post-colonial issues and in particular with her family history.
