Artist

Zineb

Sedira

on

her

love

letter

to

African

cinema

The louche glamour of a retro film club transforms Tate Britain’s neoclassical galleries, with a crimson-carpeted cinémathèque and a Parisian café-bar hosting a flickering Scopitone — the 1960s movie-jukebox that foreshadowed music videos. But in Zineb Sedira’s new installation, the vintage ticket booth has Arabic lettering, the pop-up simulates an Algerian café in Paris, and Agnès Varda’s photomontage of revolutionary Cuba, Salut les Cubains, plays on the Scopitone.

“When Words Fall Silent, Cinema Speaks”, this year’s Tate Britain Commission at the Duveen Galleries, forms a sequel to her seductive installation, “Dreams Have No Titles”, at the 2022 Venice Biennale. With her French pavilion — which won a Jury Special Mention — the Paris-born artist, who “swapped the banlieues for Brixton” in the mid-1980s, became the first French-Algerian to represent France. It staged scenes from Algerian co-productions with Italy and France, such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation of Camus’ L’Étranger. At its heart was the artist’s own film, hinting at painful links between Algeria’s colonial past, her family history and the impulse to make art — the personal ineluctably bound to the political. (The installation will be screened in Marseille from May 21.)

Her new work is a “love letter to pan-African cinema”, the artist, in bright-red jumpsuit and matching espadrilles, tells me while installing it at Tate. A red bench is piled high with 35mm film canisters and vintage equipment. Archive boards display a colourful collage of photographs, maps, news cuttings and Post-it notes, drawing on her research at the Cinémathèque Algérienne, with input from London’s June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive.