Turn from a drab east London street into the Whitechapel Gallery and instantly Zineb Sedira makes you feel like a movie star. Dreams Have No Titles, her marvellous immersive exhibition of films, stage sets, music and dance, opens in a deco ballroom whose chic mirrored bar, disco lights, ribbon of coloured lanterns and couple sashaying to Llanos Molendo’s tango “Jalousie” recreates in every detail a scene from Ettore Scola’s 1983 film Le Bal.
Moving through the show, you wander into Sedira’s reconstructions of sets from other iconic films, notably Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), or stray into the intimate glamour of dressing rooms and a band set. Finally, you swish along the red carpet of a vintage art-house cinema, complete with wooden tip-up seats, to watch Sedira’s own film; a hypnotic montage of storytelling, performance and archival footage, which gives the show its name.
Dreams Have No Titles, the exhibition and the film, plunge you into many worlds: jazz and blues, the Brixton riots, Algeria’s war of independence, the immigrant experience in a Paris banlieue. There are dolls’ houses, hairdressing salons, vinyl collections, a tapestry recalling Delacroix’s “Women of Algiers”. A coffin memorialises Sedira’s beloved sister Farida, who, suffering “un mal de vivre identitaire”, died by suicide at 19. Her tragedy converges with Visconti’s L’Etranger, a film version of Camus’ tale of a French settler murdering an Arab man “because of the sun” in the stifling heat of colonial Algeria.
The disparate elements are held together, and become magical, through what Sedira calls “my love story with cinema”. Dreams Have No Titles premiered at the 2022 Venice Biennale; Sedira, born in Paris to immigrant, illiterate parents in 1963, was the first artist of Algerian descent to represent France. She took as her framework a moment of cultural solidarity between France, Italy and Algeria in neorealist and experimental cinema, but made it personal and participatory.
Scola’s Le Bal, for example, co-produced by the three countries, recounts France’s wars and political struggles entirely through events in the same ballroom/nightclub between 1936 and 1983. In a 1950s scene, a French woman breaks taboos by dancing with an Algerian man before he is thrown out and beaten up. In her film, Sedira enacts the part of this woman, while in her installation, we can all waltz across Scola’s dance floor, or rummage through the stunning 1960s cocktail dresses in which she shimmies on screen. By inviting us into her stories, Sedira allows us to take our own journey of stardom and nostalgia, and engrosses us sympathetically in hers. Her autobiography in turn weaves into wider postcolonial narratives.
Within hours of the Venice opening in 2022, Sedira was the name on everyone’s lips up and down the Grand Canal, hotly tipped for an award (in the end the show got a special mention) as the queues for the French pavilion snaked round the Giardini — partly because, once inside, no one wanted to leave.
The Whitechapel installation, taking up both floors of the gallery, is more expansive, as seductive, and offers even those familiar with the show more time and space to absorb its complexities and the play on artifice and reality at its heart — the way Sedira unpacks her story as a charmed mise-en-abîme, repeating, echoing, condensing elements with a fairytale touch.
Most enticing of her sets is a facsimile of her Brixton living room (she moved to London as an art student). It is furnished in a 1960s retro style, adorned with Algerian and French film posters, full of records, magazines, rugs, Algerian decorative objects. Only half of it is real; the rest is a trompe-l’œil interior imitating actual elements, books stacked against images of them, a potted plant rising next to its painted equivalent. The soundtrack is 1960s-70s francarabe ballads — Mohamed Mazouni’s mournful/hopeful “Chérie Madame” — and rhythm ’n’ blues.
Welcomed as Sedira’s guests in her home, we are also visitors on a movie set, for the place and the songs reappear in her film. Interspersed with newsreels of Algerian Liberation Day, a scene of fluttering banners resembling an abstract painting, readings from psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, we watch Sedira dance, laugh, talk politics in this room. She also builds a miniature model of it, with a little cut-out of herself. The dolls’ house is on display; in the film Sedira records herself arranging it, a giant hand placing Lilliputian furniture.
When Sedira was selected to represent France, some commentators — led by Bernard-Henri Lévy and groups promoting French-Israeli relations — protested that she was a divisive choice, since she (with other Arab artists) supported cultural boycotts against Israel. She answered that “as an Algerian-French woman, I have been given an opportunity, a voice to continue being critical of all forms of hatred and racism”.
That was important in 2022 and is more so today. Working from lived experience, Sedira is not a directly political artist, but her conviction in the enriching possibility, the romance of fused cultures, is evoked in every fibre of this exhibition, without romanticising or sentimentalising immigrant lives.
Sedira’s fondest early memories were outings with her father, a factory cleaner, on his day off to La Variété cinema in Gennevilliers to watch spaghetti westerns and Egyptian epics. Later she became fascinated by newly independent Algeria as a “mecca” for radical European directors. Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, among the first films to confront French imperialism, has special resonance. It was banned, then barely distributed, in France during her childhood; encountering it in London helped her understand her parents’ past as resistance fighters and as migrants in a hostile country. Her mother still speaks little French; in an earlier film, Mother Tongue (2002), she, her mother and her daughter swap recollections, each in their native language — French, Arabic, English.
In this show, and in the vintage-look agitprop newspapers that form its unconventional catalogue, Sedira gives the stage to numerous, sometimes contradictory presences; sections on Arab feminism are exceptionally interesting. Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi explains how enduring female genital mutilation made her a life-long activist. Convinced of the intersection of feminism and democratic struggle, she calls the veil a symbol of oppression. An essay on Assia Djebar’s film La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1979), featuring a woman architect returning to the mountainous region of her childhood, flits, as Sedira does, between documentary, activism and remembrance.
“Cinema, it’s about dreaming really,” Sedira says. “You can’t give a name to a dream. Memory, identity, should be like that.” Generous, inclusive, poetic, Dreams Have No Titles is that rare thing, an exhibition of both cultural celebration and resistance. Sedira is a vital, joyous voice. Still rocking to Charles Wright’s “Express Yourself” as her film fades out, she advises: “Just keep on dancing . . . dance to the tempo of life.”
To May 12, whitechapelgallery.org
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