Whitechapel Gallery presents the UK debut of Zineb Sedira’s critically acclaimed exhibition Dreams Have No Titles.

Originally conceived for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, Dreams Have No Titles is an immersive installation comprising film, sculpture, photography and performance, that interweaves the artist’s biography with activist films produced across France, Algeria and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, a pivotal moment in the history of avant-garde film production.

Sedira transforms the Gallery’s exhibition space into a series of film sets. In one gallery, visitors find themselves in a ballroom from Ettore Scola’s iconic film Le Bal (1983), and in another, a recreation of the living room from Sedira’s Brixton home. A full-scale cinema will also be constructed in the upper galleries, to screen Sedira’s film of the same name, Dreams Have No Titles, in which the audience will see many of the sets that they’ve encountered in the exhibition as a backdrop for Sedira’s own shoot.

Dreams Have No Titles blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, using cinema and performance to foreground the importance – and joy – of collective shared experiences, while simultaneously raising a warning about the failure of the emancipatory dream that for many people remains an unfulfilled promise.

Image credit: Zineb Sedira Installation view from Dreams Have no Titles at the Venice Biennale 2022. Photo by Thierry Bal