YTO BARRADA: BITE THE HAND
Pace announces a new exhibition by New York-based artist Yto Barrada, whose multidisciplinary practice spans textiles, sculpture, film, photography, and drawing. Bite the Hand will be show recent work in the Hanover Square gallery.
March 22 – May 11, 2024
This exhibition also marks the first major display in London of Barrada’s textile works, all of which were dyed at The Mothership, her Tangier-based natural dye garden, eco-feminist research centre and artist residency which opened to the public early this year.
Found and degraded forms register the tension between the forces of nature and colonial and capitalist systems of time management and cadence, which function as markers of discipline and productivity. For Barrada, slowness and improvisation can be forms of resistance.
The purpose of these industrial labs is to simulate the effects of the sun in a condensed time frame in order to test the durability of consumer products and materials such as plastics, automotive and domestic parts, paints, and textiles against fading and corrosion. Workers share surreal fields and offices with machines, and it is the human eye that must be constantly calibrated as a tool of measurement. Meditating on the relentless nature of the mechanised processes that take place in these facilities, A Day Is Not a Day explores the simultaneity of the marvellous and the monstrous.
Symbolic and chromatic representations of the passage of time permeate many of the textile works Barrada will be presenting as part of Bite the Hand. Among them, Untitled (Hourglass I) and Untitled (Hourglass II) (both 2023) feature patterns of paired triangles converging at the apex in varying hues from lilac to tangerine.
A selection of abstract works aerially map the planning of the dye garden using abstracted rectangles and squares in the series How to Plan a Garden. In the Doorstop (Afrofuturism) series, painted wooden blocks arranged into geometric botanical forms resemble plants found in The Mothership garden. Barrada’s dye samplers, such as The Fabric Book (2014 – 22), offer the viewer new chromatic grammars.
There are names given to the 5000 impact craters riddling our Moon’s surface; 24 of these depressions are named after medieval Islamic scholars. Imprints of long forgotten asteroids, they are sustained in an environment without wind or air or erosion. Mark-making on the moon is a durational art; it operates according to lunar time, which figures outside of the short-term memory of Earth.