Yto Barrada’s Investigations into Colour and Craft

Through a selection of textiles, collages, sculptures, found objects, film and photography, Yto Barrada’s first Italian solo exhibition, at Fondazione Merz in Turin, unfolds as an expansive meditation on material transformation, bringing together works from the artist’s extensive investigations into colour theory, cultural phenomena and natural processes. 

Curated by Davide Quadrio with Giulia Turconi, ‘Deadhead’ – titled in reference to the horticultural technique of removing dead flower heads to promote overall plant growth – prioritizes the process over the outcome. This is evident in the first room, where the digital video collage Continental Drift (2021) assembles miscellaneous footage collected over eight years across the United States, Morocco and Antarctica. Weaving together personal moments, everyday marketplaces and scenes of ice floes, the montage highlights how incidental image combinations can enable meaningful narratives.

Another core element of Barrada’s oeuvre is the exploration of knowledge-production through acts of making and fostering creative exchange within intentional working communities. Take, for example, the two hand-dyed striped fabrics in Untitled (After Stella, Tetuan I) and Untitled (After After Stella, Tetuan III) (both 2019), which reference Frank Stella’s 1960s fluorescent paintings named after the Moroccan city of Tétouan. The natural dyes used in Barrada’s works are obtained from flowers, minerals and insects, produced collaboratively with Moroccan women’s communities of The Mothership, a dye garden founded by the artist in Tangier in 2006 and conceived as an ecofeminist campus and artist residency. The ‘After Stella’ (2018–19) series juxtaposes the American painter’s modernist abstractions with the hues and forms typically found in works by members of the 1960s Casablanca School. 

Influenced by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s pioneering book Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color (1902), which transformed images into colour charts, Barrada’s research into chromatic theory finds its expressive peak in ‘Color Analysis’ (2024–25), a series of hand-dyed velvet grids. For the show, Barrada applies Vanderpoel’s method to a mixed media work on paper by Marisa Merz from the Fondazione’s collection, Senza titolo (Untitled, 2002–03), alongside seven Islamic textile works from Turin’s Museum of Oriental Art, realised on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Tradu/izioni d’Eurasia Reloaded’ (2024). Formally akin to Alighiero Boetti’s square or rectangular tapestries, Barrada’s ‘Color Analysis’ works – whose earthy palette is complemented by pastels, vibrant blues and maroons – is the result of the artist’s ongoing project to foreground local materials and artisanal knowledge.

While many of the works in the show reflect on the temporality of craft and its importance in reconnecting with tradition – as seen in Practice Piece (Sewing Exercise) (2019), a photographic sequence documenting sewing activities by young women in Tangier – some are driven by a more playful approach to education and experimentation, highlighting the value of alternative learning methods. This is exemplified in Mnemonic Phrases (2019), featuring ten letterpress prints in which the artist recalls expressions used by schoolchildren.

Screened in the foundation’s vast basement space, the two-channel video installation A Day Is Not a Day (2022) reflects on the longevity of commercial products and pigments. Shot at two industrial testing facilities in Miami and Phoenix and documenting the process of ‘weather acceleration’, the film captures the gradual erosion of plastics, automotive parts, paint and textiles, as they fade, corrode and degrade under controlled exposure.

Spotlighting an artist whose approach, as Quadrio notes in the exhibition literature, is defined by the ability ‘to achieve the most with the least’, ‘Deadhead’ succeeds in probing how communities actively engaged in forms of manual production – gardening, artisanal dyeing, etc. – generate fertile dialogue in the exchange of personal histories. The works on show successfully embody Barrada’s expansive and enduring practice, characterized by its non-hierarchical approach to experimentation and its openness to learning.

Yto Barrada’s ‘Deadhead’ is on view at Fondazione Merz, Turin, until 18 May 

_{Main image: Yto Barrada, A Day is Not A Day, 2022, film still. Courtesy: Fondazione Merz}