Floating Coffins

Tickets £6.60 / £5.50 concessions (bought from Tate Britain)

Zineb Sedira's multi-screen installation Floating Coffins (2009), produced by Artsadmin and commissioned by New Art Exchange Nottingham will be on display as part of a major historical group exhibition at Tate Britain entitled Migrations.  

Floating Coffins was filmed on the little known but beautiful coastline of Mauritania, a bird watcher's paradise.  It is also where the world's shipping is beached and broken up, drawing parallels with another of the region's characteristics – the habour city of Nouadhibou, which has become a point of departure for African migrants trying to reach Europe.  

The installation is presented on a complex arrangement of 14 screens with layered sound compiled by Mikhail Karikis. The work lingers with surreal ease on figures removing scrap, birds arriving, and the extraordinary landscape where desert, sea and man's struggle to survive, all combine.  

‘'Floating Coffins is a space where life, death, loss, escape, abandoned and shipwrecked journeys meet.  It's both a toxic graveyard and a source for survival and hope.''
Zineb Sedira

“Sedira's installation gracefully enacts a contrapuntal scene of geopolitical inequality, juxtaposing a Western art of advanced technology with an impoverished African geography that encourages exodus.”
TJ Demos, Artforum International