Exhibitions
Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go: Sedira reflects on art and liberation at the Gulbenkian Foundation
Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go is the new exhibition by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian by the French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira, in collaboration with Jeu de Paume, IVAM, and Bildmuseet, and co-produced by Tabakalera, the International Center for Contemporary Culture. Sedira finds herself culturally and socially situated between two shores: on the one hand, her parents' country of origin, Algeria, and on the other, the West—primarily France and England. This intermediate position gives her a profound insight into the uprooting experienced by millions of people who, as a result of migratory flows, are unable to fully feel part of either culture.
Temporary exhibition, from September 20 to January 19, 2026, which is part of a reflection on the utopias of the 1960s, bringing culture and resistance into dialogue. Born in a Paris suburb in 1963, the daughter of Algerian parents who emigrated to Great Britain in 1986, she has developed an artistic corpus that integrates references to personal moments, places, and experiences, which transcend the intimate to question and overcome certain preconceived ideas.
Zineb Sedira's work focuses on issues of identity, migration, and memory, often inspired by her own biography and the experience of the Algerian diaspora. Through photography, video, and installation, she explores displacement and belonging, while investigating how familial and collective memories are transmitted from one generation to the next. She also pays special attention to visual archives—photographic and film—that rescue forgotten or marginalized stories. Her work also addresses the traces of colonization and postcolonialism, tensions between cultures and migratory flows, as well as the role of political cinema as a meeting place between different historical and geographical contexts.
In his first solo exhibition in Portugal, Sedira returns to the themes of art, resistance, and revolution, based on research into the 1969 Pan-African Festival of Algiers (PANAF), organized by the young Algerian state following its independence in 1962. In this context, the capital, Algiers, became a “revolutionary” meeting place for numerous global liberation movements, as well as for the various militancy and utopias that marked the 1960s and 1970s.
The title of the exhibition, Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go, refers to a song performed by the African-American gospel singer Marion Williams during the PANAF, a vast cultural and political event that celebrated and reclaimed culture as a weapon of resistance against colonial domination, and as a powerful expression of hope for the transformation of the world.
The installation is structured into four "scenes": a mise-en-scène video created from recovered militant film negatives; the photomontage and object series For a Brief Moment the World Was on Fire... ; the diorama Way of Life , a life-size reconstruction of Sedira's London living room in a 1960s aesthetic; and his vinyl collection of militant songs entitled We Have Come Back . These nuclei are joined by various "creative presences," including William Klein, Jason Oddy, Nabil Djedouani, and several anonymous Algerian photographers. The installation also incorporates a selection of images by Boubaker Adjali taken in Angola and Mozambique in 1970, along with Portuguese editions and other documents of struggle and protest that engage with the historical context of Portugal.
