On Wednesday 4 October 2023 at 6 pm, the BSR is pleased to present a Fine Arts Talk with French artist Zineb Sedira, who will be in conversation with Morad Montazami (Villa Medici).
The event will take place at the British School at Rome and will be preceded by the screenings of Les Mains Libres (Ennio Lorenzini, 1964) e Dreams Have No Titles (Zineb Sedira, 2022) at Villa Medici on Tuesday 3 October, where the artist will be in conversation with Luca Peretti (Warwick).
During the artist’s talk, Sedira will discuss with Montazami various aspects of her work. Since the 1990s, the artist Zineb Sedira has been developing a practice that anticipated the archival impulse of international contemporary art, its exploration of identity issues and memorial processes rooted in colonial history; whether through the complex relationship between Algeria and France or other Mediterranean and African detours. This artist’s talk will propose to highlight a selection of her key works, using investigative methods and documentary devices to debunk official representations – between fiction, reconstitution and reactivation.
Zineb Sedira lives in London and works between Paris, Algiers and London. Over the past 25 years, Zineb Sedira has developed a sensitive practice addressing migration, storytelling, and the bias of official histories. Born in France to an Algerian family, she relocated to London in mid-1980s. Her story and that of her family quickly became a fertile ground for artistic experiments.
Some of her solo and group exhibitions took place at Tate Britain (London, 2002); the Photographer’s Gallery (London, 2006); Musée d’Art Moderne d’Alger (Algiers, 2007); Palais de Tokyo (France, 2010); Prefix-Institute of Contemporary Art (Toronto, 2010); Blaffer Art Museum (Houston, 2013); Smithsonian (Washington, 2015); BeirutArt Center (Lebanon, 2018); Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2019); Liverpool Biennale (UK, 2021); the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (Italy2022).
Morad Montazami (France, 1981) is an art historian, publisher and curator. After working at the Tate Modern (London) between 2014 and 2019 as a curator for the Middle East and North Africa, he developed the editorial and curatorial platform Zamân Books & Curating, which explores and enhances Arab, African and Asian modernities. Montazami is currently a fellow at the French Academy in art history, researching on how contemporary photographers, videographers and digital practitioners are concerned with the energy transition, the survival of ecosystems, resistance to wild urbanism or military-industrial colonisation.
Luca Peretti is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick and was an Associate Fellow at the British School at Rome. He co-edited volumes on terrorism and cinema (Postmedia books), Pier Pasolini Pasolini (Bloomsbury Academics), and on Italian cinema and Algeria (AAMOD, 2022). He works on Italian media, film history, and Italian cultural history. His work has appeared in, among others, Senses of Cinema, The Italianist: Film Issue, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Historical Materialism, Comunicazioni Sociali, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. His book Un dio nero un diavolo bianco. Storia di un film non fatto tra Algeria, Eni e Sartre has just been published by Marsilio. He is on the editorial board of Zapruder World, Cinema e Storia, and L’Avventura. He wrote and coproduced the film Mister Wonderland (dir. Valerio Ciriaci, 2019) and collaborates with newspapers and magazines.
The event is in English.
