Yto Barrada, Untitled (Sunrise/Highway X), 2025. Photo: Annik Wetter, Courtesy the Artist. © Yto Barrada, Courtesy Pace Gallery; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, Beirut; and Galerie Polaris, Paris
Yto Barrada’s multidisciplinary practice moves between micro-histories, borderlands, resistance strategies, and Tangier — the city where she was raised and which her work keeps circling back to. This exhibition spans textile, film, sculpture, and painting, gathering new and existing works that draw on her research into colour theory, abstraction, ecological crisis, and cultural memory.
The title Thrill, Fill and Spill borrows from a gardener’s mnemonic (a memory aid) which describes: a focal plant (thriller), companions (fillers), and those that overflow (spillers). Barrada turns this popular design concept into an allegory for creative thought — anchoring, accumulating, overflowing.
Natural dyeing is central to Barrada’s practice. Her textiles are dyed with plants she grows herself at The Mothership, her artist-led eco-campus and dye garden in Tangier. Plants include cosmos, indigo, madder and each have a colonial history tangled in its roots. Their colours are records of labour, migration, appropriation. Waxes trace historic trade routes, techniques from Indonesia, North Africa and West Africa have been borrowed, reclaimed and erased. For Barrada, dye sits at the intersection of colonial commerce, women’s labour, ecological fragility, and oral transmission.
Recurring themes include disobedience, political courage, and the quiet subversion of Modernist forms. This exhibition explores borders and protective structures through works like Tangier Island Wall, a porous “sea wall” of crab traps, and Acrobatic Formations, sculptures modelled after Moroccan human pyramids. Tintin in Palestine (2025) reimagines two historic versions of the publisher Hergé’s graphic novel, Land of Black Gold, as abstract colour grids, making visible the edits and erasures that reframe history.
Barrada’s commitment to place, community, and cultural exchange is exemplified by her founding of The Mothership and The Cinémathèque de Tanger, North Africa’s first art house cinema. This exhibition extends that spirit through a residency at The Mothership by British-Japanese artist Emma Ogawa Todd, culminating in workshops for young people as part of the SLG’s Communities and Learning Programme.
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.
Informed by postcolonial thought and socio-political concerns, Barrada’s interests range from the tensions around borders, immigration, and tourism to the urban landscape, and from children’s toys to botany and paleontology. Her practice encompasses photography, film, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and publishing, while her installations often comprise both original work and found objects.
Barrada’s work has been exhibited at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2011); Tate Modern, London (2011); Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2013); The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2021); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021); and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022). In 2007, Barrada was selected to participate in the Venice Biennale. The artist has received multiple awards, including the Deutsche Guggenheim Artist of the Year (2011); the Abraaj Group Art Prize, UAE (2015); the Roy R. Neuberger Prize (2019); Mario Merz Prize (2022); Queen Sonja Print Award (2022), and Soros Arts Fellowship (2023). Works by Barrada are held in public collections worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; International Center of Photography, New York; Kunsthalle Basel; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others.
Generously supported by: Pace Gallery and Cockayne Grants for the Arts
With additional support from: Fluxus Art Projects, Lubaina Himid, Nicole Saikalis Bay, Maria Sukkar, Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation and Sfeir-Semler Gallery.
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