Hidrazone - Digital Arts Reviews & News

John Hansard Gallery

22 September – 4 November 2009

Sedira’s installation and talk offered a fascination insight into the range of work she has created as a video artist, generally focused on her family and cultural identity as an artist of Algerian descent spliting her time between London and Paris. The most successful element of the installation was the dyptich – Saphir – shot with a sublime cinemagraphic sensibility around the port of Algiers and focusing on two characters a woman and a man – one on land and the other at sea suggesting a link across the screen while maintaining the isolation and anticipation as they project their sense of expectation into the liminal space between land and sea. The lightboxes that populated the main space (see above) give a fractured impression of discarded ships on the coast of North-West Africa managed to beautify these deteriorating structures. Much of her engaging work is accessible via her portfolio website:

http://www.zinebsedira.com/

Bristol Museum

13th June to 31st August 2009

This free to enter show ensured that the queues outside the Bristol Museum were up to 6 hrs long for the duration of local folk hero Banksy’s exhibition. The work itself remains solidly one-dimensional, a one-man populist agitprop poking fun at popular targets, in some ways the greatest part of this exhibition was the audience itself – slice of British life young and old etc. though probably excluding the nations art critics who seem to remain largely oblivious to this invisible figure. The work is very much apparent in the surface, there is no depth and consequently draws in the populace who may remain sceptical about the value of the hidden meanings in much of contemporary art. Here he is poking fun at one of the UK’s most infamous self-promoters – the Banksy package comes with dashings of authenticity and a street artist disdain for authority – an anti-art theme park for the long school holidays!

Whitechapel Gallery

16th October to 3rd January 2010