French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira engages her autobiographical research with wider universal debates of postcolonialism by highlighting cross-cultural intellectual and cultural entanglements. Weaving her familial and national narrative into a postcolonial framework through her film and signage, she interlaces phrases from The Pan-African Festival of Algiers of 1969 (PANAF)—a momentous gathering of intellectuals, radical activists, and artists.

Les UNES tissées 2 (Festival Pan Africain d’Alger 1969) (2024) draws on Sedira’s latest solo exhibition in Tunisia, which features a notable body of work, a series of handwoven tapestries made in collaboration with Tunisian artisans. The piece serves as a particularly intertextual piece, functioning as both a lexical and material testimony to pan-African liberation and solidarity. Through succinct yet powerful phrases, it highlights the syncretism of craftsmanship and indigenous practice with political discourse. In this light, the inarticulateness of fabric is challenged by the stitching of militant words by Tunisian women artisans, whom Sedira deems as artists in their own right. The work thus illuminates the duality between art and craft, and, by extension, between masculinity and femininity.