This image is presented in the exhibition Unruly Archives, curated by Amin Alsaden. The exhibition brings together artists whose work employs archival traces to underscore the global footprint of war and organized violence, and speak to dimensions of conflict that are usually overlooked or deliberately suppressed. As such, the images challenge the correlation between conflict and specific regions, particularly South West Asia and North Africa, while highlighting international complicity through a history of colonialism as well as recent political meddling and military interventions. Organized violence destroys not only human beings and their environments, but also has a lasting, traumatic, and often invisible impact that brings to the fore questions of memory, representation, culture, nationhood, and belonging.

Zineb Sedira’s work has been concerned with preserving personal and collective memories, whether the chronicles of her own family’s life or the history of North Africa, and how these may manifest themselves in the present or carry a legacy into the future. Her autobiographical reflections are pretexts to investigations into larger themes such as the environment, geopolitics, and human mobility in a globalized world. The work is layered, based on research into archives, language, and geography, spanning several mediums, including photography, collage, and installation. In the series from which this image is extracted, Sedira examines traces of the First Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers (PANAF), organized in 1969, a few years after the end of more than a century of French colonization of Algeria. The work does not directly reference the artist’s family—although both of her parents participated in the resistance against France—but it does evoke the central role that their homeland, Algeria, played in global anti-imperialist struggles.

Because of its prolonged liberation struggle, by the mid 20th century Algeria became the revolutionary capital of the independence-seekers worldwide, as well as of oppressed and minority communities in the West. Comprising parades, music performances, film and theatre programs, displays of visual arts, and a symposium to discuss a shared vision and spark cultural collaborations, PANAF was the first festival to bring together representatives of different African liberation movements, both those still colonized and those from countries that had gained their independence. PANAF also invited the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and the Black Panther Party from the United States, thus linking African struggles to other relevant liberation causes from around the world. Sedira’s work brings this history back to contemporary consciousness, raising questions about the ways in which complex global narratives may be accessed through personal experiences and group identities, especially in post-colonial contexts, as well as about the fraught historical legacy of colonialism, whether in the suffering it inflicted or the transnational solidarities it cultivated.