Yto Barrada

Emily LaBarge

From botany and textiles to abstraction and corporate rejection, the artist’s show presents a playful and processual approach.

Yto Barrada: Bite the Hand, installation view. Courtesy Pace Gallery. Photo: Damian Griffiths. © Yto Barrada.

Yto Barrada: Bite the Hand, Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, through May 11, 2024

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You can measure time, and people have, in light, shadow, water, sand, candles, celestial longitudes, lunar phases, zodiacal scales. A sidereal day on earth—based not on the diurnal motion of the sun but the earth’s rate of rotation relative to fixed stars—is 86164.0905 seconds, or 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.0905 seconds. Today, most live by the Gregorian calendar, with its 24-hour days and 365-day years of 52 weeks, but there are and have been others: Julian, Chinese Lunar, Jewish, Hindu, Islamic, Persian. For twelve years, from 1793 to 1805, the French government used the French Republican calendar, also known as the French Revolutionary calendar, which was later revived by the Paris Commune for 18 days in 1871.

Almost impossibly complex (12 months, each with three 10-day weeks, and each day with 10 hours of 144 minutes, making a minute 86.4 seconds, and so on), this calendar is also beautiful, strange, bucolic, tethered to the weather, the land, the seasons, and rural labor. Months are atmospherically named “Brumaire” (mist), “Frimaire” (frost), “Pluviôse” (rainy), “Ventôse” (windy), while days are assigned plants, animals, and agricultural tools. (Pity my father, born on the day of “livestock pen.”) All this is to say what we know already, which is that time is relative, what you make of it, what is—so often—imposed upon you. Time can be altered, resisted, reconceived, lived differently, even if temporarily, or on a small scale (one person’s day is not another’s).

Yto Barrada, Untitled (After Stella, Sidi Ifni IV), 2023. Cotton, dye from plant extracts, 40 3/4 × 40 3/4 inches. Courtesy Pace Gallery. © Yto Barrada.

In the textile works, sculptures, prints, and film installation comprising Yto Barrada’s Bite the Hand, time expands and contracts, zooms in and out, takes us from the astral to the granular, in each case grounded in something that can also not be permanently fixed, or not quite: color. Fabric pieces made of silk, linen, velvet, and cotton line the walls of two rooms. In some, patterns are regular and even; in others, they are more haphazard, playful, funny, disobedient. An ongoing series, all subtitled variations of “After Stella,” riffs on the immaculate geometries and parallel lines of Barrada’s Minimalist progenitor, the painter Frank Stella, who traveled to Morocco on honeymoon in the 1960s and made striped paintings inspired by the colors and patterns he encountered in some of its towns—Marrakech, Rabat, Sidi Ifni.

Yto Barrada: Bite the Hand, installation view. Courtesy Pace Gallery. Photo: Damian Griffiths. © Yto Barrada.

Barrada’s versions replicate Stella’s fastidious stripes with strips of cotton tightly stitched in symmetrical right-angled triangles and then joined in diamonds and squares. Some fabrics have preexisting designs (small rosettes) while others are dyed hues of chalky purple, yellow, pink, gray, and blue. Some are streaked with errant lapis smears, cornflower stains, mustard drips, puce smudges. Here and there, small mauve triangles peek through like an afterthought or a palimpsest of some motif, past or future, on the verge of being. The artist, who was born in Paris and grew up in Tangier, also extends her series to take in places and landscapes of Morocco not visited by Stella: a reminder that the hues, designs, and materials of the country are not just stylistic opportunities, but rooted in specificities of place, culture, tradition, and local art.

Yto Barrada: Bite the Hand, installation view. Courtesy Pace Gallery. Photo: Damian Griffiths. © Yto Barrada. Pictured, far left on wall: Untitled (After Stella, Melilla V), 2019.

In Untitled (After Stella, Melilla V) (2019), a spectrum of warm and cool pastel hues—ocher, lilac, pewter, white—extend in thin triangles from a central node pinned high on the wall, like a fan unfolded to offer a breeze. One dark segment sucks the eye like the deepest purple of anemone flowers. The cotton is so textured and crinkled, its colors air-dried and uneven, that from certain angles it looks like velvet, and the hand twitches to touch it, this rough, imperfect rainbow. Untitled (After Stella, Sunrise/Highway VIII) (2023) has rays of different rosy widths extending upward, as if shining from a point on the horizon. Barrada’s hand is everywhere evident—in the slight variations of color and width, the vague puckering of seams, the irregular edges where fabric hangs loosely or is stuck down to coarse supporting canvas.

Yto Barrada: Bite the Hand, installation view. Courtesy Pace Gallery. Photo: Damian Griffiths. © Yto Barrada. Pictured, center: Untitled (After Stella, Sunrise/Highway VIII), 2023.

Like a collective fever dream hallucinated by Anni Albers, Louise Bourgeois, Etel Adnan, and the Victorian botanist and photographer Anna Atkins, known for her cerulean cyanotypes of plants, Barrada’s textiles collapse distinctions between art and craft, high and low, culture and nature. These works are at once post-painterly abstraction homage (and takedown), quilt, sampler, tapestry, and literal infusion of art with the soil of Morocco: Barrada’s colors come from her ecofeminist artist space and residency in Tangier, “The Mothership,” where she has cultivated a varied dye garden. Madder roots (what the Revolutionary French called November 13) provide red and pink, deep blue from indigo and woad (February 14), yellow and orange from pomegranate (November 9), coreopsis, oxalis, and cosmos. These pieces are the ultimate processual works, preserving the lifespan of a color from birth to death—if we could call it that—because every color fades, no matter how vivid.

Downstairs, a two-channel 16mm film installation shows just how true this is and how quickly it can happen. A Day is Not a Day (2022) documents commercial facilities in Florida and Arizona where materials are exposed to “Xenotest” procedures that accelerate ageing—a trial of how long colored substances can be exposed before they become “no longer acceptable” to a client, faded beyond recognition, as a technician explains. Rows of rectangular samples are fixed to metal structures that stretch endlessly through fields where they are examined for fading, or what the company describes as “failure.” Their covers flicker open and closed in the harsh light of the sun—yellow, orange, white, blue, viridian, carmine, seafoam, crimson, blush—here, gone—now, now, now—as workers at the center walk between them, making careful notes about any environmental weathering.

Yto Barrada: Bite the Hand, installation view. Courtesy Pace Gallery. Photo: Damian Griffiths. © Yto Barrada. Pictured: A Day is Not a Day, 2022.

Intermixed with scenes in the laboratory, close-ups of painted surfaces—pristine, flaking, peeling, darkened by drops of rain—are at once endless color swatches, studies in perspective, and abstract expressionist play. The film, like Barrada’s wider oeuvre, is quietly poetic but unsentimental. Science as art as climate as what we can and cannot control. What are we waiting for, watching these colors fade to corporate rejection? I waited for the light to die and then to come back again. Whether a day is a day or not, what else is there? In French, biting (the hand that feeds you, for instance) is mordant, as in wit (cf. cutting, incisive, penetrating), but also a fixative to strengthen dye fastness. In art, as in life, permanence is more valuable than change. They say, of course, not to bite the hand that feeds you. But that’s different than saying you don’t want what it’s offering, conceive every day of an alternative.

Emily LaBarge is a writer based in London. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, and the Paris Review, among other publications. Dog Days will be published in the UK by Peninsula Press in 2025. Excerpts appeared in the winter 2023 issue of Granta and the autumn 2023 issue of Mousse.