‘I

will

always

fight

against

fascism’:

Zineb

Sedira

on

her

Tate

Britain

commission

The artist Zineb Sedira was born in France in 1963, a year after Algeria’s war of liberation concluded. Her parents had left Algeria by boat in the early 60s and, as a young girl in Paris towards the end of that decade and in the early 70s, Sedira would often accompany her father to cafes frequented by members of the city’s Algerian community. These were sites of debate and organisation, where a nascent diaspora could gather and discuss from afar the developments taking place in their home country.

“There was a lot of political conversation about the new state and then there was the coup d’etat with [Houari] Boumediene in 1965,” Sedira tells me. “I was only two or three years old then, but all those things, I’m sure, seeped into me.”

This year, Sedira was selected for the Tate Britain commission, awarded annually since 2000 for a site-specific work in the museum’s 300-ft-long neoclassical Duveen Galleries. The installation, When Words Fall Silent, Cinema Speaks… is her largest in the UK to date and pays tribute to the legacy of radical 1960s and 1970s African cinema, highlighting the central role that Algeria played as a revolutionary hub.

In 1965, the country’s postcolonial government established the Cinémathèque Algérienne, a public institution dedicated to preserving and disseminating Algerian films, as well as to showcase international cinema.