Yto Barrada at PACE London
July 14, 2012
LONDON—This summer Pace London presents an exhibition of up-and-coming Moroccan artist Yto Barrada. Open to the public until July 14, Mobilier Urbain features some of the artist’s career highlights, many of which are appearing for the first time ever in the United Kingdom.
Barrada’s show studies the impact of urban development in Morocco, with particular emphasis on the resistance of local people and plants to an encroaching cosmopolitan “monoculture.” Gran Royal Turismo (2003) acts out the arrival of a dignitary to a desert town. As a sleek black Mercedes emerges from a tunnel, the toy-like model begins to transform, growing palm trees and flipping sidewalks and streets to expose newly painted surfaces. Palm trees—a persistent motif in the Barrada’s work—appear again in her 2011 Twin Palm Island, a work which protests the introduction of foreign species onto the streets of Tangiers. “The city is the stage of a necessary resistance to the global economy’s absolutist logic of development,” explains Barrada’s curator Marie Muracciole.
Barrada’s work is also on show this summer at the Renaissance Society in Chicago and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.
Image courtesy Yto Barrada

