Yto Barrada will present a new project at the FIAC 2012 at the stand of Galerieofmarseille and Galerie Polaris, and also at FIAC Hors les Murs at the Muséum d'Histoire Natuelle - Jardin des plantes.

Barrada is the Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2011 - the award given each year to young artists distinguished for their work’s significance and creativity that is part of the cultural and artistic activities the Institute promotes internationally.

Curated by Friedhelm Hütte and independent curator Marie Muracciole, the exhibition travelled from the Guggenheim in Berlin to WIELS in Brussels, the Renaissance Society in Chicago and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and will be at MACRO from September 20^th to November 11^th, 2012 with an installation conceived for the museum’s spaces. The exhibition will continue its tour to the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Zurich.

The exhibition’s title, RIFFS, has multiple meanings: Riffs recalls the Rif mountains, in Northern Morocco, where a historic revolt took place in 1921. It also refers to the Cinema Rif, home of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, of which the artist is the founding director. Above all, the title of the show refers to the musical term “riff”, a phrase of music frequently repeated in a composition, a concept that inspires the artist’s presentation of her works and the show’s layout.

Yto Barrada’s work is all about Tangiers, her city that was strongly transformed after the Schengen Agreement in 1991, which the artists analyzes in terms of both past and current consequences.

“The artist investigates history’s forgotten versions, the world behind the scenes, the shadows in the evolution of her country. Ordinary people, neighbourhoods and places of everyday life and “touristic” stereotypes play a fundamental role in front of the artist’s camera. Yto Barrada’s strategy combines a documentarist approach with an almost meditative use of images, to tell what North Africa is about, with its currently changing economic, cultural and political boundaries”, says Marie Muracciole.

The show at MACRO, which opens in conjunction with FOTOGRAFIA - Festival Internazionale di Roma, includes photographs, printed material, sculptures and videos; a program of film screenings from the Cinémathèque de Tanger will be screened at the MACRO’s conference room.

Founded in 2003 as a non-profit association, the Cinémathèque is an important cultural reality, the first of its kind in North Africa. Its mission is to develop film culture in Morocco through the promotion of foreign as well as local cinema, the production of documentaries, narrative films, artists’ videos and experimental films, with particular attention given to educational activities and to the promotion of a dialogue among professionals.

Yto Barrada will also participate in the FOTOGRAFIA with several pieces shown in “Work” the section curated by Marco Delogu which gathers works by photographers such as Roger Ballen, Claire Chevrier, Raphaël Dallaporta, Joseph Koudelka, Chris Killip, Fosco Maraini, Edgar Martins, Nina Poppe, Simon Roberts, Lars Tunbjörk and Florian van Roekel.

Biography

Yto Barrada was born in Paris in 1971 and grew up in Tangiers, Morocco. She studied history and political science at the Sorbonne in Paris and photography in New York. Among her exhibitions: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam), Haus der Kunst (Munich), SFMoMA (San Francisco), Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York), and the 2007 and 2011 editions of the Venice Biennale. In 2011 she was named ‘Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year’, with a solo-show at the Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin). Her monography will be published by JRP Ringier next year. Yto Barrada is the founding director of the Cinémathèque de Tanger.

Rome, August 2012

Galerie Polaris
15, rue des Arquebusiers 75003 Paris
Tél. 00 33 (0)1 42 72 21 27 / Mob. 00 33 (0)6 12 22 77 15