The Brooklyn Rail

To what extent does the stuff we accumulate over time—the old photographs, the letters, the children’s drawings tucked away in scrapbooks—have the potential to instruct how we remember the past? In Deadhead, Yto Barrada’s solo exhibition at the Fondazione Merz in Turin, the Moroccan-French multimedia artist investigates this question, reimagining the boundaries of both personal and collective memory through film, sculptures, found objects, photography, textiles, and collage. Curated by Davide Quadrio with Giulia Turconi in collaboration with the Museo d’Arte Orientale (MAO), the exhibition unfolds like a constellation of memories, rather than a linear narrative. Connections form gradually and intuitively; that the viewer must sometimes piece things together for themselves is part of the fun. Barrada invites us to actively engage, making acts of looking, remembering, and forgetting integral to the experience.

Born in Paris and based in Tangier, Barrada co-founded the Cinémathèque de Tanger, an arthouse cinema, and runs the Mothership, a natural dye house and ecofeminist art space. These commitments—to place, storytelling, and slow, intentional making—are evident throughout Deadhead. The exhibition opens with three textile pieces from her “After Stella” series (2018–19), referencing Frank Stella’s Color Field spectrums, created after his visits to Morocco in the 1960s. While Stella used industrial paint, Barrada recreates his forms with natural dyes made from plants and insects in her studio. His balanced bands of color find new energy in Barrada’s strips of midnight blue and pastel pink cotton, which are stitched onto the canvas in geometric patterns. Uneven seams and buckling fabric gently distort the flat surfaces and mechanical precision of Stella’s work. In embracing these so-called “errors,” Barrada reframes history—not as a fixed record, but as a living, creative force open to reinterpretation.

Across the room from the Stella-inspired canvases, Continental Drift (2021), a multiscreen, digital video collage plays on a loop, similarly confronting notions of nonlinearity. Weaving together diaries and discarded footage collected over eight years of her travels in Antarctica, America, and Morocco, the film is a key to Barrada’s consciousness: disjointed, fragmentary, with an eye for what others might forget or deem otherwise irretrievable. Scenes, both intimate and mundane, appear in rapid succession, as though in a frantic attempt to sort through a lifetime’s supply of memories. These include a chance encounter with an aging thug who “disappeared” Barrada’s own grandfather in the fifties, as well as the rituals of the Grand Socco Plaza in Tangiers (home of the Cinémathèque de Tanger) and ice floes melting in the South Pole. Tracks from seventies Moroccan Funk artist Fadoul’s album Al Zman Saib, riffing off the music of James Brown and the Rolling Stones, pulse in the background, providing an equally eclectic soundtrack.

If Continental Drift offers insight into Barrada’s relationship to memory, Mnemonic Phrases (2019) reveals her feelings about its limits. A poster series displaying ten collected phrases that, upon first glance, read as meaningless, the work references acrostic expressions recognizable only to those who have been taught them. For instance, every first letter of the words in “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nougat” stands for a planet in the solar system; the same pattern occurs in “Never Eat Soggy Waffles” for the cardinal directions. The ease of the codes, when learned, mock the difficulty of retrieving other, perhaps more important memories. Throughout the exhibition, Barrada’s attempts to reckon with the past abound; Mnemonic Phrases cleverly plays upon that quest and acknowledges its potential futility. The posters hang in proximity to other works that reference childhood (a sculpture resembling a Montessori learning toy, a collage created with Barrada’s daughter), further teasing the viewer—how far back can your mind take you?

With the inclusion of an untitled 2002/3 drawing by Marisa Merz, the Italian artist and sculptor who was the only woman associated with the male-dominated radical Arte Povera movement, Barrada presents another opportunity to test our capacity to remember. While Merz’s pastel yellows, pinks, blues, and greys recall those employed by Barrada elsewhere in the exhibition, the drawing’s presence is not entirely understood until several rooms later, where Untitled (Color Analysis From Senza Titlo, 2002/3), Mariza Merz) (2025) a site-specific work by Barrada hearkens back to Merz’s earlier piece. Utilizing a technique first introduced by pioneering color theorist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, who transformed objects into geometric grids to make color analysis charts, Barrada translates the hues of Merz’s drawing into hand-dyed velvet grids hanging in a small side room off the central space.

While initially disorientating, the decision to separate the two works proves highly effective. Like with Mnemonic Phrases, the viewer is asked to recall something that they have learned previously; unlike with that piece, the exercise is neither mocking nor futile. This time, there is no code to help us retrieve or sort the information before us, only Barrada’s careful attention to the details that trigger our emotional responses: a familiar color, an image half-remembered. Throughout Deadhead, Barrada frequently employs this method, linking otherwise disparate pieces with these quiet cues. By doing so, she draws us into an experience that resists passive observation and instead invites active participation. The viewer becomes implicated in the act of remembering—not just recalling information, but feeling through it, sensing its capacity to shift. Barrada’s work reminds us that we are constantly reshaping, misremembering, and recreating the past, not as a failure of memory, but as a vital, creative act.