'For a Brief Moment the World was on Fire' (2021) consists of eight colour photomontages. These works visualise the collective history of a global utopian liberation moment. Sedira suggests that this story is incomplete and can be told by aggregating multiple images from multiple archives. The photomontages are made by combining visuals and texts sourced from countercultural, anti-colonial, and liberation-focused newspapers and pamphlets, as well as newly discovered materials from institutions such as the Cinémathèque d’Alger, the Centre culturel algérien in Paris, and other archival collections. Sedira considers collage-making as “similar to editing film” and fittingly, the works include books, DVDs, vinyl, printed film stills, and photographs, all merging into energetic compositions that encapsulate the energy of a half-century-old revolutionary festival.

The installation ‘Headlines’ continues Zineb Sedira’s exploration of captions, sourced from 1969 Algerian newspapers. The seven lightboxes which compose this work highlight headlines which capture a way of speaking that was prevalent in the 1960s. The slogans exemplify the feeling of connection, brotherhood and sisterhood that support the alliances of this period.

mise-en scène (2019), exemplifies Zineb Sedira’s approach to filmic reflections. It is composed of eight minutes of found footage spliced together from several sequences of militant films made in the 1960s onwards. The piece exposes the relationship between cinema, collective memory and anticolonial activism in Algeria. Other parts of the footage show traces of time as a result of the deterioration in the film's chemical composition creating abstract, rhythmic patterns with granular textures. Here, we see Sedira directly reference experimental filmmaking and the structural films of the 1960s, an approach that rigorously opposes cinematic convention and that explored non-narrative forms.

Zineb Sedira explores how cinema helps shape collective histories, particularly in societies emerging from oppression. “Films were especially important back then in the Global South because the majority of the population was illiterate,” says the artist. “Cinema was a form of education.” Mixed-media sculpture 'Film Canisters II' features a mound of earthy-toned film reels made from resin, stacked on a three-legged pedestal that recalls a camera tripod. Though the reels no longer function as tools for projecting images, their ghostly, frozen form captures the storytelling power of film. The hardened resin echoes the fluidity of memory, much like how still images preserve fleeting moments.

Zineb Sedira (b. 1963 Paris, France) addresses themes of history, migration and storytelling. The role of the archive has played an increasing role in Sedira’s practice, providing the artist a tool to question so readily accepted historical narratives. An Awakening to the Dream of Thoughts forms part of a new series of lightboxes in which Sedira highlights sentences sourced from so-called “third world” militant texts to transform them into slogans. Sedira illuminates these captions in works which make reference to iconic Hollywood billboard signs, with each collated quote further spotlit in lights by surrounding individual bulbs.