Venice Biennale: the French pavilion entrusted to Yto Barrada in 2026

She is a very international artist who was chosen to represent France during the 61^e edition of the Venice Biennale from April 2026! After Zineb Sedira in 2022 and Julien Creuzet in 2024, the jury’s choice fell on the Franco-Marocaine Yto Barradawho was born in 1971 in Paris, but lives and works between New York and Tangier.

Photographs of Berber toys collected by ethnologists, a model of a Morocco in cardboard where tiny presidential cars circulate, luminous palm trees mounted on wheels, exploration of the trade in real and false dinosaur fossils… By skillfully juggling with all mediums (photo, film, sculpture, painting, textile art, installations, etc.), Yto Barrada questions our societies the relationship between true and falseauthenticity and fantasized exoticism, real and fabricated identity, as well as their links with political power.

Mixed practices and communities

This committed artist is also known for having co-founded in 2007, in the former Rif cinema, the Tangier Cinemathequecity where she also created The Mothership – a place of research and residence organized around a garden of dye plants, where ecology, feminism and the transmission of local know-how intertwine.

This is the “multidisciplinary practice” by Yto Barrada, “bringing together various artistic and social communities in search of a new utopia”, which appealed to the jury chaired by Claire Le Restif (director of the contemporary art center in Ivry, Crédac) and composed, among others, of Nicolas Bourriaud, Xavier Veilhan and Eva Nguyen Binh, president of the French Institute.

An “iconoclastic researcher, total artist without borders”

The institution promoting French culture in the world, and which pilots the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale, saluted an “iconoclastic researcher, total artist without borders” “who collects new voicesinvisible, fragile, historical or forgotten”, and “simultaneously explores cultural facts, natural processes and historical stories » by “putting forward the idea of ​​community”.

Nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2016, the artist is present in many prestigious collectionsincluding those of the Center Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In April 2026, his work will integrate the French pavilion of the Venice Biennale, entirely renovated after 15 months of work which will begin in January 2025.