Zineb Sedira

Zineb Sedira, Sugar Routes (series), 2013–2014. Installation view at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool Biennial 2021. Photography: Rob Battersby

Zineb Sedira, Sugar Anchor, 2013. Installation view at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool Biennial 2021. Photography: Rob Battersby

Zineb Sedira, Sugar Routes (series), 2013–2014. Installation view at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool Biennial 2021. Photography: Rob Battersby

Zineb Sedira, Sugar Routes (series), 2013–2014. Installation view at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool Biennial 2021. Photography: Rob Battersby

Zineb Sedira, Sugar Routes I, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Third Line, Dubai

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Zineb Sedira (b. 1963, Paris, France) lives and works in London, UK. Sedira initially found inspiration for her work through autobiographical experiences, before expanding into universal ideas of mobility, landscape, intergenerational memory and the idea of motherhood and its transmission in a globalised world. Sedira employs documentary, poetic and lyrical approaches to her work, deploying the use of portraits, installation, photography, film and video and archival research in her expansive practice. She has been selected to represent France at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and will be the first artist of Algerian descent to do so. Recent exhibitions include Jeu de Paume, France (2019), Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2018); Sharjah Art Foundation Art Spaces, UAE (2018) and Art on the Underground, London, UK (2016).

Project Description

Zineb Sedira presented a set of prints and sculptures from her Sugar Routes (2013) series at Open Eye Gallery. Sedira’s works recount the history of transoceanic human migration, the triangular trade routes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the continued trade of sugar across the Atlantic for mass consumption. Working in a contemporary context, Sedira’s photographic prints depict sugar extracted from different parts of the world housed in a modern warehouse in the French port city of Marseille. The mountainous piles of sugar present a landscape of extraction where multiple geographies convene and merge with one another; the warehouse becoming an in-between space of encounter before the sugar is processed for consumption. Juxtaposed a sculpture of an anchor made from cane sugar found in the French silo, the works act as a metaphor for migration and diaspora.

The series was originally commissioned by Marseille Provence 2013, European Capital of Culture and the Port of Marseille.

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