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.

Bad Color Combos is Yto Barrada’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands and is presented until March 2023 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Barrada arrived at her artist practice through studies of history and political science, particularly in the negotiation of political and personal experiences. Her work was introduced for the first time in the group exhibition Impressions d’Afrique du Nord at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (1998), in which she presented photographs of subjects taken in Israel and Morocco. Barrada’s first series of photographs, A Life Full of Holes, (1998–2004), used the Strait of Gibraltar as a site of inquiry, examining its status as a border between North Africa and Europe and its impact on the residents of Tangier.

Bad Color Combos presents an overview of the recent work. 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.

Curator Leontine Coelewij: “Yto Barrada has a unique voice in contemporary art. She explores various forms of abstraction, which can be interpreted as a critical reflection on the exclusionary mechanisms of modernism and can equally be seen as metaphors for current global crises. At the same time, she tells very personal stories and refers to the transfer of knowledge and experience from mother to daughter.”

Director Rein Wolfs: “The exhibition is permeated by Yto Barrada’s long-standing research into the transformation of color. In a sense, her aesthetic (color) choices can be traced back to social themes such as migration and diaspora, major thematic lines within Stedelijk’s programming. Bad Color Combos complements recent exhibitions at the Stedelijk by Remy Jungerman and Sedje Hémon, Abdias Nascimento, and Imran Mir, which offer new invocations of twentieth-century modernism.”

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.

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.”

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