Family Tree, 2005, C-Print, 150 x 150 cm
© YTO BARRADA & Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg/Beirut

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Portraits of the artist by BENOÎT PEVERELLI
© YTO BARRADA

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Bricks, 2003/2011, C-Print, 150 x 150 cm
© YTO BARRADA & Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg/Beirut

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Monkey Cage, 2008/2011, C-Print, 150 x 150 cm
© YTO BARRADA & Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg/Beirut

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Sleeper, Fig.3, Tangier, 2006, 125 x 125 cm
© YTO BARRADA

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Vacant Plot, Tangier, 2001, 60 x 60cm
© YTO BARRADA

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Belvedere 1, 2001, 49,5 x 50 cm
© YTO BARRADA

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District Epines
© YTO BARRADA

Potemkin Palm, 2009
© YTO BARRADA

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Eight things you need to know about YTO BARRADA:

1. She grew up between Tangier and Paris,
2. where she studied history and political science at the Sorbonne,
3. and subsequently attended the International Center of Photography in New York
4. I became interested in photography in an absolutely accidental way. I was studying political science; I was living in the West Bank working on roadblocks, and the strategies of people who tried to cross in negotiating with the Israeli police, military police, and I started documenting my work with photographs. And as my work evolved I started taking more photographs than notes, and then it completely shifted. The main part of my way of describing what I was interested in became through photographs, because I discovered that it was less restrictive than only my dissertation in political science. I started to be interested in art and all the possibilities it gave me to introduce the political situation.
5. Now based in Tangier, she continues to engage the complex realities around her, avoiding the rigidity of any ideological discourse, and without recourse to the spectacular or melodramatic.
6. Another of BARRADA´s responses to the dynamics of the region was to co-found the Cinémathèque de Tanger, North Africa’s first cinema cultural center, which she now directs
7. She ist the winner of this year’s Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year award
8. Yto Barrada: Riffs will be on view at the WIELS in Brussels from September 23 till December 31, 2011