PRESENTATION: Yto Barrada-Bad Color Combos

Yto Barrada is recognized for her multidisciplinary investigations of cultural phenomena and historical narratives. Engaging with the performativity of archival practices and public interventions, Barrada’s installations reinterpret social relationships, uncover subaltern histories, and reveal the prevalence of fiction in institutionalized narratives.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Stedelijk Museum Archive

The exhibition “Bad Color Combos” presents an overview of the recent work of Yto Barrada. Her multidisciplinary practice includes film, textiles, photography, sculpture. This solo exhibition presents a selection of Barrada’s work of the last five years, together with new artwork conceived especially for the exhibition. In it, she continues to explore cultural phenomena, personal histories and natural processes. In recent years, Yto Barrada has developed new series of works around themes such as the acceleration and deceleration of time; motherhood; the history of education; play; the artisanry of natural dyes and color as material; traditions of modernism and our futile attempts to control nature. In her work, Yto Barrada often refers associatively to international modernism in an attempt to destabilize a western interpretation of art and to examine the local issues of globalization. In the After Stella series, she references a specific moment in the history of abstract painting: the color field paintings produced by the American artist Frank Stella in the mid-1960s. Stella drew his inspiration from his travels in Morocco and titled paintings after Moroccan cities. Alongside Stella, Barrada also invokes Mohamed Chebaa, Farid Belkahia, and Mohammed Melehi, painters affiliated with the Casablanca School in the 1960 who pioneered North African modernism in their abstract paintings. This exhibition presents three of Barrada’s most important films in 8 and 16 mm: “Tree Identification for Beginners” (2017), “The Power of Two or Three Suns” (2020) and “Continental Drift” (2022). “The Power of Two or Three Suns” was shot in an industrial testing laboratory where a variety of materials and products are subjected to artificially simulated natural forces to assess their durability. The exposure of colors to the power of the (artificial) sun acts as a metaphor for the passage of time, for aging and decay, and for the impact of climate change and the ecological crisis. Yto Barrada has made a number of works especially for this exhibition. “The Mothership, the Strait, the Edge” (2022) is a wall collage at the entrance of the exhibition, which refers to The Mothership, an eco-feminist research centre and residency she initiated, focusing on natural dyes and textiles, overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar and the southernmost tip of Spain. The plant extracts from this garden provided the dyes for many of the artworks in this exhibition. The new sculpture “Tangier Island Wall” (2022) refers to an island off the coast of Virginia in the United States, with a population of 378 inhabitants, which is slowly sinking into the sea due to rising sea levels. This small community, with a vanishing economy based on crab fishing in the famous Chesapeake Bay, has tried to control nature. In this sculpture, Barrada used the crab traps to create a minimalist structure, a porous ‘sea wall’. Along with her sociopolitical concerns, Yto Barrada’s artistic practice is grounded in the idea of community, artistic kinship, and collaboration with friends and family. The artist explores her interest in play, education and experimentation in a gallery in which alongside her own work, she showcases that of female artists of three generations: Elodie Pong, Bettina (Bettina Grossman) as well as new work co-created with her 8-year-old daughter, Tamo.

Photo: Yto Barrada, The Power of Two or Three Suns, 2020, 16 mm film transferred to video, color, sound, 11 min., 13 sec., film still. © Yto Barrada, courtesy Pace Gallery and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg

Info: Stedelijk Museum, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 22/10/22-5/3/2023, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, www.stedelijk.nl/