WStep into the Whitechapel Gallery and you’re jumping straight into a bar. Bottles are lined up and a disco ball hangs overhead. A tango is playing and a couple is on the dance floor. What started to feel a little creepy was that I had seen these movements before. She’s checking her reflection in her mirror, which isn’t there, and her gentle, slightly creepy man pops a mint before taking her hand and pulling her closer. Exaggerated steps and turns, fumbling lunges for a kiss. It’s funny how things stay with you.
People say it feels like a movie when the day starts to feel sluggish. The clock has stopped at his 12:04 and we are watching Ettore Scola’s live reenactment of a scene from his 1983 film Le Bal. There, the viewer is taken to various important points of his 20th century. A series of flashbacks all take place in the same Parisian dance hall. In the scene that unfolds, he is in 1936, but we are here now. The dancers are as real as you and me. The bar is a movie set, with big lights at the end, and the toilet doors are trompe l’oeil photographs on the gallery walls. The last time I went to this bar was at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Zineb Cedilla received praise from the jury for her work in the France Pavilion. Here we go again. Wherever we are, there are other places too.
Dreams Have No Titles is even more immersive the second time around. If it’s your first time, you may have no idea what’s going on or where you’re going. You have never seen a coffin, or sat on a small single bed, or found yourself in an artist’s living room in Brixton, much less went to the small cinema in the last room. there is no. Have you ever wondered why cables, equipment trunks, and suitcases are left abandoned? And behind Steenbeck’s flatbed editing table is a film editing suite and tower of film cans, where spools of film are wound between rollers and ready for use. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Cedilla leaves us suspended between reality and fiction, past and present, mise-en-scène and everyday life. Every detail is important, but you won’t know why until you leave the gallery and come back. It’s as if we are trapped in a story that starts and stops. There are jumps and pauses, shifts in location and broken continuity, stories within stories, and films within films. When you’re in the morgue scene in Luchino Visconti’s Etranger, Albert Camus’s 1967 version of The Outsider, you’ll soon find yourself at Sedilla’s house. We met her old friends, the artist Sonia Boyce (who coincidentally had the British Pavilion in Venice right next to the French Pavilion) and the curator Giraine Tawadros (now Director of the Whitechapel). watch a recorded conversation in which the two reminisce about squatting and housing. Co-operatives, politics and solidarity. There are multiple entanglements in Dreams Have No Titles, between the stage and reality, between her possessions and a near-seamless simulacrum. This is all magical, the present and the absent intertwined, moving back and forth in time.
Things then get even more complicated when a critical revelation is revealed in a movie shown at a small movie theater. Its seats remind me of the small movie theaters that Cedilla once haunted in Paris. Her film begins with an introduction to Orson Welles’ F for Fake (the film itself is entirely artificial, leaving us wandering between truth and fiction). It then takes us on a journey through Cedilla’s own life. It also includes clips from films such as her 1966 The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Cedilla first saw the film in her 1990s in London, and it was not shown in France after that. (2004) – Ennio Lorenzini’s Les Mains Libres was a controversial film that was thought lost for half a century until Cedilla discovered it in the archives. Cedilla tells us a lot about her own life as she moves in and out of shots, delving into her “love story with her movies.” We listen to her read Frantz Fanon about Algeria’s struggle for independence, and watch her jubilation at the declaration of independence. She talks about her sister’s suicide, music, racism, and humiliation.
The artist is both narrator and character here, playing different versions of herself at different stages of her peripatetic life, first moving from Algeria to France and then England. With multiple contradictory identities: Algerian and French, Arab, Muslim and Berber, she is also an artist, filmmaker, director, singer and dancer. Here she is twice, both herself and a cutout figure in the miniature dollhouse version of her movie set. She sings with the band and green dances to Charles She Wright’s “Express Yourself” towards her screen, celebrating the complexities of her life. How rich that is!
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