Transmission as Resistance in the Work of Zineb Sedira

Abstract

This chapter proposes a feminist reading of Franco–Algerian multimedia artist Zineb Sedira’s video and installation work from the early 2000s to today in order to consider the potential for global feminist art histories that are intersectional and relational through the ways in which Sedira focuses on memory. Memory and its transmission across generations is treated in three distinct but overlapping ways: memory within the context of Sedira’s only family, using Sedira’s personal story as a means of reckoning with larger histories and the construction of the gendered subject within them; collective memory in the context of post–colonial Algeria; and memory as held by the land itself, read especially through the lens of ecofeminism. In Sedira’s work, the gendered subject is constructed through women’s stories told from inside the perspective of family, that is, women considering their roles as daughters, mothers, and wives, told against and overlaid on top of the history of colonialism.