Fotomuseum Winterthur presents Barrada. Riffs an exhibition of photographs by the French-Moroccan artist. In 2011 she was selected by Deutsche Bank as “Artist of the Year” 2011. The award includes an exhibition made possible by the financial institution, which was presented at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin followed by stops in Brussels, Chicago, Birmingham, and Rome, and which can now be seen at Fotomuseum Winterthur.
Yto Barrada, Restaurant, Villa Harris, fig. 2, 2010. C-print, 125 x 125 cm© Yto Barrada & Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg/Beirut.
For more than a decade, Yto Barrada has confronted the political realities of North Africa in her photographs, films, and sculptures. Her work engages with life in her hometown of Tangier, Morocco, whose particular situation along the Strait of Gibraltar is emblematic of the historical up-heavals experienced by many countries in northern Africa. “I’ve always been attentive to what lies beneath the surface of public behavior,” says Yto Barrada. “In public, the oppressed accept their domination, but they always question their domination offstage. Subversive tactics, strategies of class contestation, forms of sabotage used by the poor – this is what I am most interested in.”
For the title of the exhibition, “Riffs,” Barrada took inspiration from the musical use of the term, the Cinéma Rif cultural center founded and directed by the artist, and Morocco’s nearby Rif mountains, which have long been a stronghold of anti-colonial insurgency.
Yto Barrada monitors the changes in her city with hawk-like attentiveness, responding to them with actions, images, and films that nevertheless maintain a remarkable calm, distance, and restraint. Neither iconic nor bellicose, they do not purport to be a weapon of enlightenment, nor do they offer a complacent, arrogant visual world that knows exactly how to behave and what to attain. As if the artist would always take a step back, her quiet, nearly static square color photographs offer visual fields opening up onto a landscape, an urban constellation, a being, a repose. They reveal objects, buildings, and people so we might engage with them as observers, immersing ourselves, seeking, exploring, contemplating. We see here a sign and a gesture, there a rebellion; strikingly dedramatized, real and allegorical at the same time.
Yto Barrada – Riffs was conceived by Friedhelm Hütte, responsible for the Deutsche Bank art program, and Marie Muracciole, independent curator and art critic.
The accompanying catalogue with text contributions by Okwui Enwezor, Friedhelm Hütte, Marie Muracciole, and Daniel Soutif, as well as an interview by Negar Azimi with the artist may be purchased for CHF 49.-.
Information about Fotomuseum Winterthur exhibitions, guided tours, events:
+41 52 234 10 34 and www.fotomuseum.ch
