Zineb Sedira: Can’t You See the Sea Changing?

Working across photography, installation and film, Zineb Sedira draws upon her personal history and close connection to Algeria, France and the UK to explore ideas of identity, gender, environment and collective memory. Spanning both of the De La Warr Pavilion’s galleries, Can’t You See the Sea Changing? is Sedira’s first exhibition in a UK public gallery for over 12 years and focuses on her ongoing investigation into the conditions of transnational trade, identity and migrant consciousness in a post-colonial context, within which the sea is a recurring motif.

Throughout her career, Sedira has become a leading voice in addressing the question of what it means to live between different cultures, often bringing together autobiographical narration, fiction and documentary genres. Through her varying approaches to storytelling, Sedira interrogates what she refers to as ‘spaces where mobility expires’, or the (in)ability of individuals to depart, return, escape, or exist in transit between certain lands and identities. Whilst her narratives are embedded with histories of migration and exile, particularly in relation to her home countries of Algeria and France, through her work Sedira considers what it means to be transported through visionary acts of imagination, acts that carry us to different places through the merging of past and present time frames. 

Beginning from Sedira’s fascination with the sea as an enigmatic yet geopolitically charged space, as well as the coastal context of the De La Warr Pavilion, the exhibition spans a period from 2008 to the present day and brings together photography, installation, film and archival material in a constellation of seafaring traces. Images of imposing lighthouses, abandoned shipwrecks, and eroded rocks are layered with the memories, daily experiences and tragic deaths of those who have moved across surrounding seas. By highlighting these human narratives in her work, Sedira builds an oceanic archive that unearths stories of migration and movement that would otherwise remain invisible, whilst demonstrating the power of images to reconstruct our understanding of history. Through the artist’s analytical eye, the exhibition draws upon her ongoing exploration of archival processes and the different ‘windows’ or thresholds that they can open up. 

Can’t You See the Sea Changing? is a collaboration between De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, and Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), where the exhibition will be presented in spring 2023. 

Upcoming exhibitions
February 4–May 21, 2023

Angelo Madsen Minax: A Crisis of Human Contact
Angelo Madsen Minax is an artist and filmmaker based in Vermont and New York City. His multi-disciplinary practice spans documentary filmmaking, narrative cinema, essay film, media installation, sound and music, performance, text and collective practices. Minax’s projects explore queer and trans intimacies, chosen and biological structures of kinship, metaphysical and technological phenomena, archival documents, and speculative imagination. Drawing on elements of auto-ethnography and psychodynamics, his work is fuelled by his history of participation in justice-oriented communities and DIY media activism. A Crisis of Human Contact at the De La Warr Pavilion will be his first major solo exhibition in a public institution.

Anna-Maria Nabirye & Annie Saunders: Up In Arms
Artists Anna-Maria Nabirye and Annie Saunders remove the boundaries between process and artwork as they bring together social practice, visual art and performance for their Up In Arms project, commissioned by the De La Warr Pavilion.

During the lead up to the exhibition opening, local residents of Hastings and Rother can join free social practice sessions facilitated by Nabirye and Saunders. Participants are invited, two at a time, to re-create and re-embody the iconic 1971 portrait of activists and friends Dorothy Pitman-Hughes and Gloria Steinem. Through this process, the artists create a safe space for two friends to have a conversation about friendship, racism and feminism. The resulting documentation and recordings will be integrated into an expansive installation in the First floor gallery, comprising film, photography and archival material. Footage from the social practice will also be used in a live performance presented alongside the exhibition at De La Warr Pavilion in spring 2023.