Zineb Sedira – Dreams Have No Titles

Pavilion of France, La Biennale Arte, Venice

Art Installation Documentation, 2022

This series documented Zineb Sedira’s film installation for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which transformed the space into a working film studio. The commission focused on installation views and details that trace how sets, props and archival material around Les Mains libres staged a fluid space between fiction and reality, personal and collective memory, and the history of militant cinema across the Mediterranean in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Exhibition text by La Biennale

Zineb Sedira’s film installation investigates the drive to make militant films in the 1960s and ’70s, a testament to the cultural partnerships forged in the past between the two sides of the Mediterranean. Zineb Sedira has transformed the French Pavilion into a film studio, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, between personal and collective memory. The artist employs the cinematic processes such as the remake and the mise en abyme and finds inspiration in numerous film genres. In the background, she shines the spotlight on the film Les Mains libres, realised by the Italian director Ennio Lorenzini in 1964; for this project, she found and restored the reels of this first Italian–Algerian coproduc- tion. A French artist with a plural identity, Zineb Sedira has constructed her work on a personal journey spanning France, the United Kingdom, and Algeria. For this new project she has teamed up with a curatorial team made up of Yasmina Reggad and the duo Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath.

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