Portrait Yto Barrada, 2010. Photo: Benoit Peverelli. © Yto Barrada
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Yto Barrada, Bouquet d'iris Jalobey, Tanger 2007. Courtesy Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut
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Yto Barrada, Girl in red, Tangier 1999. Courtesy Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut
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Yto Barrada, Red Walls 2, 2010. Deutsche Bank Collection. Courtesy Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut
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Yto Barrada, Man sitting, Casablanca 2001. Courtesy Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut
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Yto Barrada, Vacant Lot, 2001. Deutsche Bank Collection. Courtesy Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut
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Yto Barrada, Landslip, Cromlegh de m'zora 2001. Courtesy Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut
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With Riffs the Deutsche Guggenheim presented Yto Barrada’s poetic and politically committed work to a wide German public for the first time. Now the exhibition of Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” 2011 is on view at the Museo d'arte contemporanea Roma. After the premiere in Berlin, the show moved on to WIELS, Brussels, the Renaissance Society, Chicago, and the IKON Gallery in Birmingham. Before the exhibition tour ends at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Riffs is now being shown at one of Italy’s most renowned museums.
With its futuristic architecture and ambitious contemporary art
program, MACRO offers an ideal platform for the Moroccan artist’ show.
Yto Barrada is the second artist, after Kenyan-born, New York based Wangechi Mutu, to be honored as Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year.” The Slovakian artist Roman Ondák
was the third in 2012. Barrada’s photographs, films and installations
revolve around the situation in her home city of Tangiers, which is
also the focus of Riffs. “My nervous system is
linked to this place,” says the artist, who was born in 1971. In
her photographic works, Barrada approaches the city and shows its
residents imprisoned in permanent state of waiting. Applying the same
sensitivity with which she encounters the people in her pictures, she
devotes herself to seemingly random details in her landscape and
architectural photographs. Her photos can be read both as images of
reality and as metaphors for social states. This ambivalence runs
through her entire work. Yet there is one constant in Yto Barrada’s
work: solidarity with the poor, the fragile, the people threatened with
disappearance.
Yto Barrada: Riffs
Artist of the Year 2011
21 September 2012 –11 November 2012
MARCO, Rome, Italy
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