DUNDEE.- Dundee Contemporary Arts announced a major exhibition by Zineb Sedira, Can’t You See the Sea Changing?. Developed in collaboration with De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, the show is Sedira’s first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery for over 12 years and follows her acclaimed exhibition, Dreams Have No Titles for the French Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, which received the Special Mention of the Jury. Can’t You See the Sea Changing? focuses on Sedira’s ongoing investigation into the conditions of transnational trade, identity and migrant consciousness in a post-colonial context, within which the sea is a recurring motif.

Working across photography, installation and film, Sedira draws upon her personal history and close connection to Algeria, France and the UK to explore ideas of identity, gender, environment and collective memory. Over the course of her career, she has become a leading voice in addressing the question of what it means to live between different cultures, often bringing together autobiographical narration, fiction and documentary genres. Through these varying approaches to storytelling, Sedira interrogates what she refers to as ‘spaces where mobility expires’, exploring the ability or otherwise of individuals to depart, return, escape, or exist in transit between certain lands and identities. Whilst her narratives are embedded with histories of migration and exile, particularly in relation to her home countries of Algeria and France, through her work Sedira considers what it means to be transported through visionary acts of imagination, acts that carry us to different places through the merging of past and present time frames.

Beginning from Sedira’s fascination with the sea as an enigmatic yet geopolitically charged space, as well as the coastal contexts of the De La Warr Pavilion and Dundee Contemporary Arts, the exhibition spans a period from 2008 to the present day and brings together photography, installation, film and archival material in a constellation of seafaring traces. Images of imposing lighthouses, abandoned shipwrecks, and eroded rocks are layered with the memories, daily experiences and tragic deaths of those who have moved across surrounding seas. By highlighting these human narratives in her work, Sedira builds an oceanic archive that unearths stories of migration and movement that would otherwise remain invisible, whilst demonstrating the power of images to reconstruct our understanding of history. Through the artist’s analytical eye, the exhibition draws upon her ongoing exploration of archival processes and the different ‘windows’ or thresholds that they can open up.

The title of the exhibition, Can’t You See the Sea Changing? Is especially timely and directly evocative of rapidly shifting coastlines and geopolitical borders, where the legacy of colonialism and greed has created a climate crisis that sees shores swallowed by the sea, and bodies of water dry up inland. This rapid change has caused the forced migration of many communities, who now leave behind ancestral lands in search of security and resources. Sedira nods to the impossibility of this situation, where the people most affected are left behind to continue to produce and export to those who feel they have no need to fear the rising tide.

The exhibition features a never-before-seen series of photographs titled Sea Rocks (2011-2022) that documents the eroded curvatures of rock formations Sedira came across at Cap Sigli Lighthouse in Algeria. Displayed on free-standing wooden structures reminiscent of false walls in a theatrical stage set, the images are given sculptural presence within the gallery. There are images within images in the three-channel film installation, Transmettre en abyme (2012), in which the viewer is immersed in photographs captured by Yves ‘Baudelaire’ Colas, a photographer who immortalised with his camera thousands of boats as they entered and exited the port of Marseille from 1935 to 1985. These images are now maintained by the film’s protagonist, Hélène Detaille, who takes us on a journey through the images, attempting to open and understand Colas’ compulsive archiving of these maritime movements.

The significance of lighthouses as architectural and political landmarks is explored in several works in the exhibition, including photographs from the series Broken Lens (2011) and Museum of Traces (2013), and the lighthouse keeper log books revealed in Registre du phare (2011), which mark through their quotidian accounts the advent of Algeria’s independence in 1962. An immersive installation of Sedira’s multi-screen film and sound installation, Lighthouse in the sea of time (2011), explores two historic lighthouses in Algeria – Cap Caxine and Cap Sigli – that were built during French colonial rule. As imposing structures set amidst the ocean and on the tip of coastlines, lighthouses stand as witnesses to the many journeys made, often unsuccessfully, by migrant boats. The fragmented nature of these vistas and viewpoints is conjured by the photographic landscape of Shattered Carcasses and Architecture of the Forsaken (2008-2009), which transports viewers to Nouadhibou on the coast of Mauritania, one of the main places in Africa from which migrants depart towards the Canary Islands, and from there to Europe. The rusty abandoned ships rotting in the sea evoke the tragedy of failed journeys and the ecological disaster imminent to its decay. This situation is intensified by the fact that Western countries continue to dispose of their waste in Mauritania and the wider African continent. Sedira presents us with a post-industrial vision of death, decay, and waste.

Sedira’s interest in recreating spaces within spaces and images within images is evident throughout the exhibition. Building upon her 2019 installation, Way of Life, which comprised a photographic diorama of the artist’s living room, as well as the set designs presented within her Venice Biennale exhibition, Sedira has recreated part of her Brixton studio within DCA’s gallery space. By presenting archival objects, maritime collectibles and furniture from this workspace, the artist reveals the significance of personal archive and memory within her practice, as well as the material traces that form part of her own connection to both sea and land.

Zineb Sidera says: “Through my exhibition at DCA, Can’t You See the Sea Changing? I am looking forward to building connections between North Africa and Scotland using the stories of the sea. This show is about the Joy of my people, transfigured by freedom; This exultant shift is overflowing, like a river flooding its banks”.

Zineb Sedira (born 1963, Paris), lives in London and works between Algeria, Paris, and London. Recent solo exhibitions include Bildmuseet (Umeå, Sweden, 2021), SMoCA (Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art) (US, 2021), Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2019), IVAM‑Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (Spain, 2019), Beirut Art Center (Lebanon, 2018), Sharjah Art Foundation Art Spaces (UAE, 2018), and Art On the Underground (London, 2016). She has previously shown in institutions such as Tate Britain, Centre Pompidou, Mori Museum, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Musée d’Art Moderne of Algiers, Brooklyn Museum, Mathaf – Arab Museum of Modern Art, Gwangju Museum of Art, and MMK Museum für Mordern Kunst, as well as in biennials and triennials, including the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2011), the Triennial for photography and video at the Institute of Contemporary Photography in New York (2003), the Sharjah Biennale (2003 and 2007), the Folkestone Triennial (2011), New Orleans’ international art exhibition (2017) and the Liverpool Biennial (2021).

Sedira represented France at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022) and was awarded a special mention for her exhibition titled Dreams Have No Titles.