Home
Street
The Chemistry of Color, the Body Language of Resistance: Yto Barrada’s “Thrill, Fill and Spill”

The Chemistry of Color, the Body Language of Resistance: Yto Barrada’s “Thrill, Fill and Spill”

South London Gallery (SLG) is hosting “Thrill, Fill and Spill,” a multidisciplinary exhibition by Moroccan-French artist Yto Barrada, running until 11 January 2026. For Barrada, Tangier is not merely the city where she was born and raised; it is the ever-returning heart of her practice, a border zone and the epicenter of invisible strategies of resistance.

By weaving together textile, film, sculpture, and painting, Barrada presents her research into ecological crisis, color theory, abstraction, and cultural memory.

Natural Dyeing: An Archive of Colonialism and Women’s Labor

At the core of Barrada’s works lies natural dyeing and the history of colonialism.

The Mothership Eco-Campus: The artist dyes her textiles using plants she grows herself—indigo, cosmos, and madder—at The Mothership, her artist-led eco-campus in Tangier.

Hidden Roots: The roots of each of these plants conceal a colonial history. For Barrada, color itself is a record of women’s labor, migration, and cultural appropriation.

Intersection Point: Dye stands at the crossroads of colonial trade, ecological fragility, and oral transmission. Techniques borrowed from Indonesia, North Africa, and West Africa are appropriated, reclaimed, and erased in Barrada’s works.

The exhibition title itself transforms a mnemonic used by gardeners into an allegory for creative thinking: to anchor, to accumulate, and to overflow.

Disobedience, Borders, and Rewriting History

Themes of disobedience, political courage, and the quiet subversion of Modernist forms recur throughout Barrada’s work. The exhibition also features powerful sculptures exploring borders and protective structures:

Border Structures: Tangier Island Wall (a permeable sea wall made from crab traps) and Acrobatic Formations (sculptures modeled on Morocco’s human pyramids) embody these ideas.

Erasing History: The work Tintin in Palestine (2025) reimagines two historical versions of Hergé’s graphic novel Land of Black Gold as abstract color grids. This potent critique makes visible the erasures and edits of history.

Art, Community, and Legacy

Barrada’s artistic commitment extends far beyond the studio, materializing in community and cultural exchange:

The Cinémathèque de Tanger: The artist is known for founding North Africa’s first arthouse cinema, The Cinémathèque de Tanger.

Young Talent: This spirit continues through the residency program at The Mothership. Works produced there by British-Japanese artist Emma Ogawa Todd culminate in workshops under SLG’s Youth Programme, demonstrating how art is reproduced within communities beyond institutional narratives.

Yto Barrada (b. 1985, Morocco-France) is a globally recognized figure celebrated for her multidisciplinary investigations steeped in postcolonial thought and socio-political concerns, and honored with prestigious titles such as the Venice Biennale and Deutsche Guggenheim Artist of the Year.