Beyond the veil
by Sarah Irving
[ people - june 04 ]
Zineb Sedira was born in France of Algerian parents and came to Britain in 1986. She studied art in London, completing her MA in 1991 and rapidly gaining commissions, including one for Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, from her degree show. Having started out in France as a craftswoman and maker of jewellery, she moved on from this background when her degrees at St Martins and the RCA introduced her to a variety of new media. She spoke to Sarah Irving during her one-woman exhibition at the Cornerhouse Gallery in Manchester.
Zineb Sedira's art uses video and photography to depict women - young and old, often Arab - and their relationships with the world and each other. In some images they are universal and anonymous, specific features obscured; while in others, close-up videos show Zineb, her mother and her daughter engaged in conversation across the linguistic differences which cross-cut the generations.
Given the often ethereal or highly personal nature of her work, does Sedira feel that her art is political?
"Definitely, in the sense that the personal is political and - in a way - all art is political. It's not the responsibility of all artists to be political with a capital 'P,' but we all engage with the world, and I deal with issues like immigration, colonialism and postcolonialism because they concern me. I always wanted to be some kind of artist, but initially I didn't know how to combine it with being a good mother."
Given the viewpoints she takes on the relationships between Eastern and Western cultures, Zineb Sedira is unsurprised by how traditional Muslim garments are changing:
"Women are wearing LVMH and Calvin Klein logos on their hijab. It's part of the wider interest in brands and trainers, a way for women to fit into consumerist cultures while still indicating that they retain some of their own cultural values.
"This mixture of tradition and of making one's own Islamic identity obvious, but also expressing any young person's interest in fashion and image, is problematic, because it's part of Western consumerism and its entry into other cultures.
"It's also interesting in relation to the idea that the veil is always oppressive. I don't think Western women are freer than Muslim women (though, of course, it is always arguable what that means), but it is oppressive to use naked women and teenagers to sell cars. I find this more upsetting than seeing women veiled. At least she is an individual, and is encountered as a person and not a commodified form.
"There are exceptions, in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban, but women in most Muslim countries are not forced to wear hijab. Here, men and women are bombarded with oppressive images of women. I'm concerned about my daughter growing up in this culture. She is starting to get into that energy and vibe, wanting to wear high heels and so on, to look 15 when she is 12. In France, the nakedness of women and depictions of sex are even more obvious than in Britain, but there are restrictions on showing very young women in a state of undress. Britain might be little bit more restrained, but there are still such young girls in some pictures, and there are terrible teenage pregnancy rates.
"In 'Silent Sight', I wanted to look at these thoughts about the veil and sexuality and exploitation of women. The woman in it wears the chador, the heavy, black Iranian garment, but her eyes are heavily made-up like in the French films of the 1960s - lots of make-up and passive sexuality. It makes me angry that the chador is always seen as the veil. In the West, no one takes account of the many different ways women veil - the flowing white headcloths that women wear in Algeria, or the light dupatta in Pakistan. In 'La Maison de ma Mère,' I use images of white cloth and lace to represent Algerian women, and the series of images of small sections of my mother and her house is about feminist ideas of the representation of women as parts, fragments.
"I don't wear hijab in this country, but the women in my family who do wear it have chosen to do so as adults. My sister in Blackburn says she feels much safer, more relaxed and more respected when she wears it. She doesn't get unwanted attention from men in the street. They've never tried to make the girls and teenagers wear it, so the trouble in France about wearing the hijab in school hasn't touched them yet."
Because she deals so often with issues around the veil, it has often dominated writing about her.
"I don't think I'm so much the token black/ Arab/ Muslim/ woman artist. There's been lots of really bad writing about my work, full of stereotypes about "oppressed veiled women". But writers are beginning to understand my work, and talk about it and listen to me when I talk about what's in it.
"My work deals with issues apart from the veil, anyway. A lot of it is about my family, their history and the Algerian war, which they felt needed to be explored and publicised. They are happy to show the political aspects of their own lives as a way of countering the French denials of the atrocities. It's a way for them to break their own silence and society's denial. They were involved in the resistance to the French occupation.
"My mother's accounts of the Algerian war of independence are spontaneous. I just asked her to talk about the war and took it from there. She doesn't always fully understand the editing process and sometimes she asks why I didn't leave something in, but she is generally pleased. She'll see the final version of the big video work [where her mother gives a narrative of events in their village, including the rape of Algerian women by French soldiers] in Paris in 2005; at the moment she's only seen it on a TV screen. It's also about women as storytellers and bearers of history in Arabic cultures - so is 'Mother Tongue', the piece with videos of my mother and daughter, who can't talk to each other because one speaks Arabic and some French, and the other English and a little French. They communicate a bit through me, and mainly through looks and touch and non-verbal communication. My daughter also likes to express the different parts of her identity by wearing bits of Arab clothing and jewellery alongside Western clothes, and she especially likes to wear her Arab-style earrings when her grandmother is around.
"Lack of communication is also a way of conveying meaning. My mother never learned French properly because she wanted to show her rejection of French language and behaviour after the war of independence, even though she and my father lived in France for economic reasons - North African immigrants were used as cheap labour. They experienced a lot of racism, and my parents felt a sense of failure that they had to bring up their children in that culture. They were angry that the French had managed to divide their Arab identity too, setting Algerians against each other by giving French citizenship to Algerian Christians and Jews but not Muslims, so that Arabs and Algerians would turn against each other."
