A few years ago, the French Moroccan artist Yto Barrada visited MoMA PS1, in Queens, following an invitation to create a site-specific work for the museum’s courtyard. As soon as she entered the space, she noticed its walls. Tall and made of concrete, they reminded her of the old city ramparts and Brutalist architecture in Tangier, where she grew up and still spends part of each year.
“When I’m thinking of walls, I’m also thinking of symbolic walls, power structures,” Barrada tells me over video chat from her Brooklyn studio. Creating an outdoor, large-scale sculpture was a first for Barrada, but responding to power structures has been at the core of her cross-disciplinary practice for more than two decades.
As she worked on her installation—an arrangement of massive, brightly colored concrete blocks called “Le Grand Soir”—Barrada pulled from other influences that often show up in her work: labor, play, cultural histories. Such themes also appear in a concurrent solo show of Barrada’s photo-based work at the International Center of Photography, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Though disparate in scale and material and coincidental in timing, as a pair, MoMA PS1’s “Le Grand Soir” and ICP’s “Part-Time Abstractionist” speak to the many ways Barrada explores the social forces that shape our world.
“Le Grand Soir” opened in PS1’s courtyard in late April, just in time for the warmer months. When I visited on a sunny day in May, one trio of friends sat atop lilac-colored blocks while a small child galloped toward another before flinging herself on it. “How people would interact with it was part of the story: people whispering and talking on it, climbing on it, having fun. That is all part of the piece,” says Ruba Katrib, a curator at PS1 who, along with Jody Graf, organized the show.
More than just a playful spot to perch, the work is packed with heady philosophical meaning. “Le grand soir is a turn-of-the-century expression that I borrowed from the anarcho-syndicalists,” Barrada says. “It’s in songs, it’s in literature. And it means what we yearn for: the times of social justice. It makes a lot of sense today.” The work is an homage to her father, Hamid Barrada, a political activist and journalist who was once the top editor at the pan-African newsmagazine Jeune Afrique.
Barrada also tapped into the history of Moroccan acrobats for “Le Grand Soir.” In the 15th and 16th centuries, these acrobats would form human pyramids as part of a defense strategy against the Portuguese. From there, human pyramids morphed into a spiritual tradition in Morocco, but, Barrada says, in the 1800s the “act” was imported to the United States and Germany as entertainment at circuses and fairs—a cultural touchstone lost to Western commodification.
Her references don’t stop there: Her color choices stem from the CIAM Grid, a color-coded rubric used by a congress of architects in the mid-20th century for urban planning; the PS1 building used to be a school, and these blocks are in effect giant Montessori toys; each block’s height is 30 inches—or half an Yto—keeping even a large-scale project connected to the human body. While Barrada is prone to deep historical dives as part of her research process, one doesn’t need to learn all the details in order to “get” her art. “I have to fight against the storytelling. I love that people can enjoy the work without knowing anything,” she tells me.
“I think that’s one of the reasons it’s such a successful piece in the courtyard,” says Graf. “It is a space where people come in and interact with it without necessarily reading the wall text, or expecting to be taught history. But if you do want to jump in, she gives you all the clues.”
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This is also why Barrada eschews elaborate wall text in a show like “Part-Time Abstractionist” at ICP, which surveys 20 years of the artist’s work in photography. She would rather you approach the work and come up with your own interpretations.
But, of course, there is always a story if you ask. “I booked the darkroom, I got there, and I had forgotten my negatives. So I started printing whatever was in my bag,” Barrada says, explaining how she came to use found objects like candy wrappers and children’s toys for the multiple photogram series on display at ICP. She is “a huge fan” of the Oulipo movement, a group of writers formed in France in 1960 who imposed their own restrictions as a means of creativity. “I was focusing on the constraint that I had inherited being a busy mom,” says Barrada.
For her Practice Piece series, from 2017, Barrada made contact prints of sewing practice papers she found in the trash. “They become these black-and-white abstractions with little puncture marks [from the sewing machine’s needle], and they look almost like Frank Stella paintings,” says Elisabeth Sherman, the curator of the ICP show. “They remind us that abstraction, and this idea of modernism, comes from so many places and is equally as prevalent in areas that we might overlook. Those things can be celebrated as just as interesting, inspirational, and beautiful as the kinds of things we show in our largest museums.”
Culture at the margins: an ever-present interest for Barrada, whether she’s making a short film, a sculpture, a letterpress print, or abstract textiles. Her recent show at Pace Gallery in London, “Bite the Hand,” which closed earlier this month, was a debut of sorts for the natural dyes that came out of The Mothership, Barrada’s eco-feminist space in Tangier that includes a dye house, a garden of indigenous plants, and an artists residency. In addition to The Mothership, Barrada runs Cinémathèque de Tanger, a restored Art Deco cinema and cultural center. And for the last few years, she has been on a mission to showcase the work and life story of the late Bettina, an artist, under-recognized in her lifetime, who lived in the Chelsea Hotel.
I ask Barrada if she always knew she’d lead a life filled with so many different projects and artistic mediums. She lights up. “I have projects that are so embedded,” she says. “One is in the beginning, one is in the middle. The dye pot is out. It’s supposed to go in the trash because the project is finished, but I still think I could dip a little something in it. So the projects end up being—I love this word in French, débordement, going beyond the border. It could mean overflow, or a form of trespassing, but also there’s a form of generosity, of slowness, of taking into account the interruptions in time, in life itself.”
It’s understandable why someone with so many ideas, in so many mediums, each with its own spiral of rabbit holes, would feel called to the Oulipo philosophy of constraint. It keeps the débordement in check. You can take in the world’s struggles, often all-consuming these days, but you can also climb atop a giant cerulean block in a museum courtyard, and enjoy the beautiful view.
“Le Grand Soir” will be up at MoMA PS1 through 2026. “Yto Barrada: Part-Time Abstractionist” is on view at ICP until September 2, 2024.