Color Problems

French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada (b. 1971, lives in Paris and Tangier) is one of the most important voices in contemporary art today. For more than 20 years, her multidisciplinary practice—films, installations, sculptures, textile works, publications, photographs, site-specific projects—has explored cultural phenomena and subaltern histories, strategies of resistance and disobedience, historical narratives and natural processes, the transmission of knowledge, and methods of archiving and collection. Undertaking long-term projects, often in collaboration with other artists, amateurs, and experts, she has successively focused on botany as politics and geography, the history of education, the economics of prehistoric fossils, postcolonial links between Morocco and the West, and a reinterpretation of the history of abstract pictorial avant-gardes to offer an alternative vision of modernity. The playful resources of language, the dynamics of translation, and the infinite possibilities of print occupy a prominent place in her practice.

This long-awaited comprehensive monograph—following one previously published by JRP|Ringier in 2013—spans her entire practice, from her first acclaimed photographic series A Life Full of Holes (1998–2004) to her most recent research on textile, dying, and “color problems” in which she once more bridges the worlds of nature, materiality, and (art) history.

Designed by London-based design studio A Practice for Everyday Life, the volume, lavishly illustrated and produced, brings together an international group of writers to decipher the various methodologies, aspects, and perspectives active in Barrada’s manifold practice: writer and curator Omar Berrada, anthropologist Arnaud Dubois, London’s Barbican Centre curator Wells Fray-Smith, New York’s MoMA curator Thomas Lax, art critic and historian Elisabeth Lebovici, editor and researcher Anaïs Masson, and writer and translator Yasmine Seale. The volume also features Barrada’s commitment to the city of Tangier where she founded the Cinémathèque de Tanger in 2006 and the eco-feminist African campus and dye garden The Mothership in 2017, as well as her relationship with American artist Bettina (1927–2021) whose estate is in her care.

Major recent solo exhibitions include Comme Saturne, French Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2026); Le Grand Soir, MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City (2024–2026); Deadhead, Fondazione Merz, Turin (2025); Part-Time Abstractionist, International Center of Photography, New York; Solidité Lumière, Festival d’Automne, Paris (2023); Bad Color Combos, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022–2023); and A Raft, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021).