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The Franco-Moroccan photographer and artist, who works in her own way on postcolonial history and its multiple ramifications, is entrusted with a completely renovated French pavilion for the 61st edition of the Biennale, which will be held in spring 2026.
She is a resolutely international artist who has won the French pavilion for the next Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art. As announced by the French Institute in charge of this early designation, the Franco-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada, 53, will therefore represent France in the spring of 2026. Born in Paris in 1971 to a journalist father and a left-wing activist mother, raised in Tangier where she returned in the early 2000s to create the city’s first cinema library, which became an essential meeting place for the local and international art scene. By the way, she has lived in New York ever since. Coming from the same generation as a community of artists who navigate between the Maghreb and France – including Kader Attia –, she is a decade younger than her Franco-Algerian colleague Zineb Sedira who enchanted the French pavilion in 2022 With the Lebanese artist Walid Raad, Yto Barrada created the Arab Foundation for in Beirut at the end of the 1990s, after living for a time in Israel. l’image, to collect and preserve the images of photographers from Arab countries of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Since then, Yto Barrada has worked in his own way on postcolonial history and its multiple ramifications, sometimes unsuspected, first exploring in an essentially photographic form the “temptation of the West” and the explosion
