Yto Barrada: Agadir

For her first major London commission, artist Yto Barrada weaves together personal narratives and political ideals to create a complex portrait of a city and its people in a state of transition.

The sweeping form of the Curve is transformed with a dramatic installation – encompassing a mural, film commission, sculptures, and a series of live and recorded performances – to consider how a city and its people might address the process of reinvention following disaster. Barrada takes as her starting point a surreal text by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine – Agadir (1967) – reflecting on the devastating earthquake of 1960 that destroyed much of the modernist Moroccan city.

Over the past two decades, Barrada’s multimedia practice has explored questions ranging from migration to abstraction, from fossils to botany, examining the strategies of resistance employed every day in her native Morocco.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication, including a newly commissioned interview with the artist by acclaimed architect, architectural historian and scholar Jean-Louis Cohen, as well as text by exhibition curator Lotte Johnson. The book is the seventh in a new publication series by Barbican Art Gallery that focuses on the Curve exhibition programme.

Live performances* will take place on selected Saturdays 11am–8pm – 10 (12noon– 4.30pm) & 24 February, 3 & 31 March, 21 & 28 April, 5 & 12 May

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www.barbican.org.uk