The exhibition’s title, “DEADHEAD,” refers partially to the horticultural follow of eradicating lifeless flower heads to stimulate the expansion of all the plant. Taking over the notion of lowering to the important, the present attracts on a good choice from Yto Barrada’s inventive oeuvre, together with movies, sculptures, installations, textiles and prints, a few of which have been specifically created for the event.
Among the many echoes, call-outs and visible experiments within the exhibition, one reference is to Barrada’s analysis into the pioneer color theorist collector and philanthropist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel and her guide, Colour Issues: A Sensible Guide for the Lay Pupil of Colour (1902) initially supposed for a feminine readership of dressmakers, flower painters and interior designers. The writer’s revolutionary colour-analysis charts transformed photographs into geometric grids, by way of a scientific association of the color spectrum, which she dubbed the “music of sunshine.”
With the sequence Colour Evaluation, which debuted on the MAO (Museo d’Arte Orientale) as a part of the exhibition Trad u/i zioni d’Eurasia (2023-24), Barrada presents hand-dyed velvet grids, through which she utilized Vanderpoel’s approach to remodel photographs from Vanderpoel’s private assortment of antiques, to chose works from the MAO’s assortment of Islamic artwork, and to a drawing by Marisa Merz. Many pure dyes used within the work have been made in The Mothership, an artist-led challenge by Barrada envisioned as an ‘ecofeminist-campus’ for rising, making, and studying pure dyes and radical indigenous misplaced traditions, in her backyard in Tangier.
The exhibition might be accompanied by a list printed by hopefulmonster.
The exhibition extends the collaboration between the Fondazione Merz and the MAO (Museo d’Arte Orientale), the place Yto Barrada’s work was introduced within the group exhibition Trad u/i zioni d’Eurasia (2023-24.)
at Fondazione Merz, Turin
till Could 18, 2025
