ONE dark room, 14 screens and ten small speakers form the canvas for Zineb Sedira’s latest video work Floating Coffins. Presented at the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva), the installation, commissioned by New Art Exchange, Nottingham, is as poetic as it is startling. Featuring fragmented images of the beautiful but little-known coastline of Mauritania, which has become a large scrap yard for the world’s shipping, the work is set against Mikhail Karikis’ stirring soundtrack referencing the near-by harbour city of Nouadhibou.

As the rusting carcasses of abandoned boats rock redundantly in the sea, flocks of birds arrive on the shore and scavengers, tired from looting, rest on the sand, the noise of passing trains, lapping waves and wind rumbles on, and I start to wonder if the French-born artist has a personal connection to this unique location.

“You will smile, but I found it on Google when I was doing a lot of research into symmetry between modes of transport,” the Royal College of Art graduate explains. “There wasn’t much information, but the few images I saw really made me want to go there, so in June I did a recce. When I got there, I totally thought, this is the place, not only because of the dead boats, but also because it’s a place of immigration, and a place of birdwatching. Suddenly it became the perfect place because of all this movement.”

Zineb’s initial trip formed the basis for the complementary photographic and light box work which completes the exhibition, entitled Currents of Time, but she returned in December to shoot Floating Coffins, which takes its title from the name of the crudely made rafts used by locals to pull themselves to the boats.

“I very much work on this idea of contradiction; beauty and ugliness, difficult and easiness, visible and invisible, beautiful and sadness,” Zineb explains. “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.”

The daughter of Algerian immigrant parents, Zineb was born in Paris in 1963 and reveals the idea of displacement, which she explores, comes from her own experiences.

Now living in South London with her three children, the artists tells me: “I always start working from my own autobiographical story, which is the story of immigration or movement. I was born in Paris, my family came to France from Algeria by boat, and then in ‘86, when I left Paris to come to England, I took the boat. At the time, there was no Eurostar, so I took the Calais to Dover boat, and that was the second time where there was this sort of this displacement of family by boat and that’s where the idea came across initially.”

Continuing on this autobiographical theme, Currents of Time is the latest in a body of work exploring the metaphors of the sea, which started with Saphir (2006).

“I guess for me, the sea is such a powerful space,” the artist tells me when I ask why she is drawn to this subject. “The sea is a non-place, it’s not like land, which has a country, names and people, the sea is a place of passage. Although I know some seas belong to countries, the borders are not defined, there is this non-identity. A non-place if you like and borderless.”

Currents of Time: New Work by Zineb Sedira runs at Iniva at Rivington Place, London, until Saturday, July 25. Details: 020 7729 9626 or www.iniva.org