French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada, whose Brooklyn-based practice investigates postcolonial historical narratives through sculpture, installation, photography, and textile, will represent France at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026, the Institut Français announced this week.
Barrada was chosen by a selection committee organized by the Institut, which manages the French pavilion under the guidance of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture. She will succeed French-Caribbean conceptual artist Julien Creuzet, who represented the country in this year’s edition.
“Gratitude as the world burns. Thank you all,” Barrada said in a statement on her Instagram announcing the news on November 19.
It won’t be Barrada’s first time participating in the Biennale. For the 2007 edition of the contemporary art festival, she showcased her photographic series Public Park—Sleepers (2006–7), in which subjects are shown resting face-down in grassy public park spaces, in the central group exhibition. She also returned to Venice in 2011 to exhibit in a “para-pavillion” (a large site-specific installation intended to host other artworks) by Beijing artist Song Dong. Alongside personal works by British artist Ryan Gander, Barrada presented The Telephone Books (or the recipe book) (2011) — a photographic series offering a glimpse into her illiterate grandmother’s notebook.
Born in 1971 in Paris to Moroccan parents, Barrada mainly grew up in the Moroccan port city of Tangier, located on the Straight of Gibraltar. Much of her work is rooted in her home city, where she tends to examine geopolitical issues such as immigration and climate change that affect residents’ daily lives. Her early series A Life Full Of Holes: The Strait Project, which consisted of photographs taken from 1998 to 2004, examined the Strait of Gibraltar as a borderland passage for those traveling from North Africa to Europe and the difficult questions migrants face when choosing to leave their homelands in search of a better life.
Barrada’s interest in border communities and cross-cultural dialogue has carried on in many of her projects. In 2006, she co-founded the Cinémathèque de Tanger, which bills itself as North Africa’s first and only cinema cultural center and film archive, and currently operates out of a restored 1930s film theater in one of Tangier’s main public squares. She also recently founded the Tangier-based experimental research and residency center The Mothership, which serves as an gathering place for “pan-African eco-feminist practices” centering on textile art, natural dyes, and gardening.
Barrada’s work has been shown in and is currently held in the collections of institutions worldwide, including solo exhibitions this year at the Museo d’Arte Orientale in Turin, the ICP, and MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, which will remain on view in the institution’s courtyard through 2026.
Earlier this year in March, the artist was one of several to withdraw work from the textile survey Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican in London after the arts institution decided not to host a lecture addressing Israel’s attacks on Palestine.
