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.

Early life and education

Zineb Sedira was born in 1963 in the Parisian suburb of Gennevilliers; her parents were immigrants from Algeria. 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

Zineb 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, Arabic, and English respectively, with Sedira acting as the linguistic conduit between her mother and her daughter who don't have a language in common.

Work

Major exhibitions