Artist Yto Barrada (Moroccan-French, b. 1971) is set to transform the MoMA PS1 courtyard with her large-scale installation titled “Le Grand Soir,” a two-year commission that continues PS1’s tradition of inviting artists to engage with its unique campus. This marks Barrada’s first major outdoor work, featuring colorful concrete blocks stacked into pyramidal towers. These structures invite visitors to sit and explore, offering an interactive experience in the courtyard and serving as a backdrop for PS1’s signature summer music series, Warm Up.
Barrada’s installation draws inspiration from various historical and architectural sources, including the construction of human pyramids in Morocco, Moroccan Brutalism, and her own family history. “I am thrilled to be presenting my first large-scale outdoor sculpture in the courtyard at MoMA PS1,” Barrada states. “We increasingly live in a world of walls, the ones built by the powerful to exclude or contain. As someone who has long researched strategies of resistance, I have centered this project on another form: the pyramid, which instead of walls offers steps, games, secrets, and possibilities. I wanted to combine the reliability of geometry with the precarity of body structures, celebrating forms of solidarity and escape.”
Barrada often explores hidden histories embedded within architectural and geometric forms, revealing intersections of material, political, and personal narratives. For “Le Grand Soir,” she looks to the tradition of human pyramids in Morocco, which have been used for acrobatics, martial arts, and spiritual practices. Historically, these pyramids were employed by warriors to peer over fortifications and surmount enemy walls. The fifteenth-century Sufi mystic Sidi Ahmed Ou Moussa of Tazerwalt, now the patron saint of acrobats and dancers, led the defense of southern Morocco against Portuguese incursions, blending mysticism with a warrior ethos. By the nineteenth century, Moroccan acrobats were performing in European and American circuses, offering orientalist entertainment for Western audiences. Today, the tradition continues in Moroccan town squares, with acrobats known as the “children of Sidi Ahmed ou Moussa.”
Each of Barrada’s structures in “Le Grand Soir” is inspired by different acrobatic formations traditionally used by Moroccan performers, such as tqal (weight), bourj tarbaite (tower of four), and bourj benayma ou chebaken (tower lift with net). These formations are translated into thirty-inch modular concrete blocks balanced atop one another, also nodding to the legacy of Moroccan Brutalist architecture. After Morocco’s independence from France and Spain in 1956, concrete Brutalist buildings proliferated, embodying utopian aspirations in public works like elementary schools, street markets, and civic buildings. Barrada’s choice of colors for the installation reflects those of the CIAM Grid, a visual method of analyzing urban zones using four hues: green (housing), red (labor), yellow (leisure), and blue (mobility).
The title “Le Grand Soir” (The Big Night) is a popular French phrase rooted in early 20th-century anarcho-syndicalist culture, connoting a future revolutionary moment when a new world might be born. The work also draws from Barrada’s personal history; in the summer of 1963, her father was condemned to death for his political activism as the head of UNEM (Union Nationale des Etudiants Marocains), the Moroccan student union. With her mother’s help, he escaped from Morocco, becoming a fugitive and crossing borders in disguise, remaining in exile until the 1970s. This familial feat of escape converges with the history of acrobatics in Morocco, an evolving tradition that also traces broader cultural transformations.
Yto Barrada (b. 1971, Paris) is an artist known for her multidisciplinary investigations of cultural phenomena and historical narratives. Engaging with the performativity of archival practices and public interventions, Barrada’s installations reinterpret social relationships and uncover subaltern histories. In 2006, she founded the non-profit Cinémathèque de Tanger, one of North Africa’s first art house cinemas and archives, and in 2021, she founded The Mothership, an eco-feminist research center and residency in Tangier, Morocco. Her work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the 2007 and 2011 Venice Biennale. As part of The Artist’s Choice series at MoMA, she organized the exhibition “A Raft” (2021–22). Barrada’s works are held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London. Recent awards include the Mario Merz Prize (2022), the Queen Sonja Print Award (2022), and the Soros Arts Fellowship (2023).
The exhibition is organized by Ruba Katrib, Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Jody Graf, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1.
Source: MoMA PS1, ArtReview
