Zineb

Sedira’s

home

movies

When words fall silent, cinema speaks. So reads the glorious red legend, in letters reminiscent of the Hollywood sign, at the start of Zineb Sedira’s transformation of the Duveen galleries at Tate Britain. It is the establishing shot for everything that unfolds through these vast marble halls, though it also doubles as the closing credit. At one end, the sign appears in English block capitals on its towering scaffold; at the other, in scrolling Arabic, it casts a tracery of beautiful shadows on the wall. It all depends, like those proverbial early movies, where you came in.

Visitors entering through the back of the galleries will see a travelling cinema in the form of a projector beaming its light from a tiny window piercing the side of a dusty green van. Canisters of old movies stack up inside; luggage is strapped high on the roof. You can watch the movie from a leather pouffe on a carpet that appears to stretch directly into the film, where its subject, the critic and historian Ahmed Bedjaoui, is telling the enthralling story of how Algeria became the epicentre of radical cinema after its independence from France in 1962. Bedjaoui is sitting on an identical pouffe. It seems we are all in this together.