Sunken Stories: Recent Works by Zineb Sedira
A wooden boat, mangled and broken, has been upturned onto its side and hangs suspended in a frozen sea of clear resin. Pieces of wood from the wreckage have fallen away and lie scattered on the bottom. Its mast and sails have collapsed and jut out awkwardly from the surface. It cannot be repaired. It is difficult to make out the shape of the boat as it might once have been, whole and undamaged. It is unrecoverable. It can only be re-made in one’s imagination: a fictional reconstruction of something which existed in another place and time. The boat is not a solitary vessel although it stands alone, suspended in its transparent block and mounted on a stainless steel structure. Arranged around it in a circular formation, Sunken Stories (2018) is made up of a collection of other wooden boats, each one similarly shattered and sunk into its rigid rectangles of resin. The works of Zineb Sedira – installations, films, photographs and, more recently, sculptures – frequently confront the disjuncture between past and present, resisting the imposition of official historical narratives and activating stories and voices that have been suppressed. Poetic meditations on the difficulty of recovering lost histories and narratives, Sedira’s works precipitate a collision of the present and past, forcing awkward questions to the surface. Hauntingly beautiful and arresting images are overlaid with spoken words and soundscapes that expose uncomfortable truths, shattering any illusion that these are distant histories that can be relegated to the past or neglected on the basis that they happened in a faraway place. In other works, the artist delves deep into forgotten archives, resurrecting memories and happenings which have been buried or ignored. Unearthing what appears to have been lost from collective memory, Sedira compels us to re-assess our present and its contingency on the past.
The submerged model boats of Sunken Stories are miniature dhows, traditional Arab sailing vessels with triangular masts, that were used for fishing and trade, navigating between the Arabian peninsula, India and East Africa. Like the ancient shipwrecks which are occasionally exhumed from the depths of the ocean, the shattered carcasses of Sedira’s boats bear witness to the dangers of the sea and its equivocal nature. They simultaneously evoke a rich history of global trade between three continents, and at the same time, the more recent perilous traffic of migrants and refugees in overcrowded vessels which have sunk to the bottom of the seas. Two very different chapters of globalisation are distilled in these lyrical works: an earlier history in which Arabs, Indians and Africans were involved in a complex, international exchange of goods, peoples and cultures over centuries during which Europe remained very much at the periphery; and a more recent phase which has consigned the majority of the peoples of the globe to the margins of the world’s economy.
Shipwrecks have appeared before in Sedira’s works. Abandoned ships and wrecks are the subject of an earlier installation by the artist entitled Floating Coffins (2009). Left to disintegrate along the coast of Mauritania, the skeletal remains of countless vessels populate the world’s largest ship graveyard, located in the harbour city of Nouadhibou. The hulks of rusting and decaying cargo ships lie like giant beached wales whose gliding movement through the sea has been abruptly stalled. Made up of fourteen video screens that are scattered unevenly
across the walls of the gallery space, speakers dotted in between the screens and connecting wires trailing behind them, the installation seems to mirror the haphazard choreography of the discarded vessels. Fragmented images appear fleetingly on the multiple video screens: the massive hull of a rusting cargo ship; shards of broken wood and rigging which have been washed up on the shore; corroding and misshapen bits of metal; flocks of migrating birds taking off from the beach en masse; the turquoise sea which can no longer support the dead weight of the cast-off vessels. A haunting soundscape by the artist Mikhail Karikis envelops the images: birds screeching and flapping their wings; waves lapping against the shore; the hollow drumming of metal against metal; the barely audible voices of men shouting in the distance; the gentle bobbing of vessels which are still buoyant, rising and falling with the ebb and flow of the sea.
The artist pictures an apocalyptic landscape in which lifeless vessels and scavenging birds are the only inhabitants, hinged between a catastrophe that has already taken place and one which is poised to happen in the future. The maritime debris of countless ships pose an environmental threat as toxic waste and hazardous objects pollute the surrounding waters. At the same time, this particular strip of coast of North West Africa is the launching point for illegal immigrants hoping to reach the Canary Islands in precarious crafts that all too often become floating coffins. Set adrift in flimsy, overcrowded crafts by traffickers of human cargo, drowned refugees are relegated to the swollen underbelly of globalisation. Cast off from the international currents of global capital which moves effortlessly across borders and jurisdictions, they join the sunken ships, forgotten and out of sight.
© Gilane Tawadros, 2021.
Extract from ‘Sunken Stories: Recent Works by Zineb Sedira’, first published in Zineb Sedira: A Brief Moment, Paris: Jeu de Paume, 2019.