Fugacity and calm, industry and nature, unscrupulousness and intelligence. These are the ideal adversaries that Yto Barrada (born in Paris in 1971, lives between New York and Tangier) pits against each other on her own terrain of artistic production, a terrain faithful to the naturalness of existence and at the same time touched by the convulsive rhythms of contemporaneity.
YtoBarrada, “Deadhead”, installation view at Fondazione Merz, Torino, ph. Andrea Guermani courtesy Fondazione Merz
The reflection on time, marked by a multi-material investigation of colour, guides the solo exhibition that Fondazione Merz dedicates to the cosmopolitan artist, winner of the Mario Merz Prize 2024. Far from questioning the chronological scansion of events, Yto constructs an inedited visual language based on the time of presence, of which past and future are merely assonant references. A perfect example of this is Continental drift, a montage of diaries and discarded videos collected during eight years in Antarctica, America and Morocco, in which through different chromatic filters the three temporalities are inverted, interpenetrated, reset to zero. From this resetting of chronological time emerges, on the one hand, the experience of pure presence of fruition (spectatorship is here and now) and, on the other, the reflection on a theme very dear to the artist, the relationship between belonging and eradicating, which is explored in depth throughout the exhibition. This is the case, for example, of Lit-ras-d’eau, a raft-bed that fills the enormous and distressing empty space of the first room with a provocation on the life of the migrant, founded – and therefore not founded – on instability and randomness.
YtoBarrada, “Deadhead”, installation view at Fondazione Merz, Torino, ph. Andrea Guermani courtesy Fondazione Merz
Just as uncertain and peregrine is the fate of the uprooted stateless person of the sea, so too Barrada’s works are the fruit of a complex journey through experimental places and times. After the Parade is the perfect synthesis of this physical and symbolic wandering. Consisting of a child’s mask in the shape of a wave found abandoned on a New York street after a climate protest, the work travels from social criticism to play and from America to Fondazione Merz in Europe. Thus the object, again handmade, becomes the word of the tale that the artist composes about life in the contemporary world, a world in which all too often we are annihilated by the logic of profit and are thrown against nature in a time of consumerist acceleration, which goes so far as to make rubbish (the mask left in the street) what until the previous moment was the vehicle of the voice of the people.
YtoBarrada, “Deadhead”, installation view at Fondazione Merz, Torino, ph. Andrea Guermani courtesy Fondazione Merz
The exhibition at the Fondazione Merz is not an innocent one. In a serious interplay of material and colour, Barrada puts us face to face with the cages of our age, from globalisation to marginality and from productive hypertrophy to ecological crisis. Crab cages, some left open in the hope that there is still an escape possible, make up not by chance the great Tangier Island, a wall of traps for political, economic, collective freedom. The exhibition goes on to transport the viewer into a “poetic” time, that is, one built on a perfect balance of abstraction, imagination and mystery, far removed from the spastic and neurotic rhythm of our days. Yto, just as she cuts out cereal cartons and pieces of fabric to make colour games, with her artistic practice carves out a safe space in which to cultivate the time of presence and cut the withered flowers of the world we inhabit, an operation that in horticultural circles is known as “deadheading”.
Yto Barrada, “A Day is Not A Day”, 2022, 2-channel film installation, 16mm film, color, sound; 18 min., film still, courtesy the artist and Fondazione Merz
Embodying that poetic time are the works on display which, as handcrafted products, manifest the invisible creative scheme of the artist and refer to an original materiality. By “original” here we must mean the naturalness both of the material, as the colours used are pre-industrial, and of the conception, which does not follow a rational and analytical line but one of pure affiliations and references. In fact, as curator Davide Quadrio states, the only way to access Yto Barrada’s art is to «catch the moment of assonance and let it be enough».
Info:
Yto Barrada. DEADHEAD
20.02.2025 – 18.05.2025
Fondazione Merz
Via Limone 24, 10141 – Torino
www.fondazionemerz.org
Graduate in Philosophy from the University of Milan, where she currently lives, she specialized in aesthetics and contemporary criticism. Passionate of the art world and devoted to research, she believes in the potential of the interdisciplinary gaze, which intertwines critical thinking, typical of philosophical backgroud, and the communicative power of art to shape the evolving identity of its time.
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