Middlesea

Since its premiere opening at The Wapping Project, London in 2008, Zineb Sedira's MiddleSea has toured internationally to major galleries in the UK – London, Southampton, Nottingham –  and internationally to Canada, South Africa, France, Netherlands and now South Korea. MiddleSea is a film installation that charts a journey by boat, an archetypal, timeless passage between two places. The viewer enters a space in between, one lone passenger stares out to sea, watching, waiting.

We are drawn into the narrative. Time passes, memory and imagination mix. Accompanied by an audio soundscape from Mikhail Karikis that combines location sound with composed sound, MiddleSea evokes a journey taken by generations.

Undoubtedly the most accomplished work to date in this new phase of Sedira’s practice… It unravels like a ballade, a visual meditation on the state of transit. The camera wanders over the white decks, sometimes catching the breathtaking immensity of the horizon, sometimes, in a series of verging-on-abstract shots, capturing the ethereal beauty of the tiniest details, the sea water caught in the deck’s rusted paint or the droplets in the boat’s wake.
Coline Milliard, Frieze (2008)

MiddleSea provides a poetic, universal image of the journeys that generations of migrants have made, both physically, and in memory.
Art Daily