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.
