Zineb Sedira

'These portraits of women freedom fighters transmit individual war stories from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ women (and people) rather than the usual voices of political leaders or the ruling elite.

The portraits bear witness to the roles of women often neglected in the history of the Algerian war and post-independence. Here, the memory invoked is personal. The emphasis is on living memory, carried and transmitted by the photographer, Nadja Makhlouf, who links the past and the present.

It is another way to access history; a route via personal legacy as a way to understand the world rather than public archives and official sources.'

Zineb Sedira is a Franco-Algerian feminist video-artist and photographer. Her work explores the complex intersections between gender, space, colonialism and post-colonialism. Her 2010 installation Image Keepers specifically analyses questions memory and forgetting. Through the work of the Algerian photographer Mohamed Kouaci whose photographs - ranging from images of female soldiers and life in refugee camps to key revolutionaries such as Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro - captured the Algerian Liberation struggle, she asks controls history and the archive in post-independence Algeria.

Zineb Sedira, Gardiennes d’images (Image Keepers), 2010. Three screens video projections with sound. Production SAM Art Projects for the exhibition Gardiennes d’images, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Photo by André Morin.