Yto Barrada

Lyautey Unit Blocks

Back to collections
Yto Barrada, Lyautey Unit Blocks, 2010, Wood and paint, Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg. Art Jameel Collection

Artwork Details

Artist

Yto Barrada

Title

Lyautey Unit Blocks

Date

2010

Medium

Wood and paint

Dimensions

Dimensions variable

Credit Line

Art Jameel Collection

Work Description

Lyautey Unit Blocks presents a series of colourful, painted wooden blocks in the shapes of arches, triangles, rectangles and squares. They can be stacked and laid in various configurations. They can precariously be assembled to spell ‘LYAUTEY’, the surname of the first Resident-General of French-occupied Morocco from 1912-25, Marshal Hubert Lyautey. A contested figure, Lyautey oversaw large-scale urban development programmes, as well as wide ranging surveys of Morocco’s artistic practices and archaeological sites. 

Working with French architect and urbanist Henri Prost he directed the design and construction of colonial Rabat, Fez and Casablanca. Lyautey believed urbanism played a central role in changing people’s lives, where people of different social and cultural circumstances could coexist in urban spaces that referenced the local culture and aesthetics, while new, modern cities were developed for the European populations. Behind these intensions lay the economic goal of building cities that foregrounded tourism and segregated Europeans and the local community. The birth of this new architecture in Morocco was also intended to serve as an experimental model for modern twentieth century city-building in France and French colonies.

Barrada’s work engages with the unevenness of mobility and the asymmetries of boundaries between Europe and Morocco. Her practice often negotiates a conceptual path between politics and poetry in order to describe the inequity of prevailing global structures. 

The oversized children’s blocks evoke the city skyline and refer to the project of modernisation in architecture and urban planning. Modernism, as an integral part of colonialism, is not always visible: under the guise of children’s toys, a sense of tension, destruction and disorder surfaces.

Artist Biography

Yto Barrada (b.1971, Paris, France) lives and works between Tangier, Morocco and New York, US

Yto Barrada works over a wide range of media including photography, sculpture, installations, textile and video, her extensive series and project-based practice is rooted in the culture, landscape, economy and politics of her hometown of Tangier, Morocco. In 2006 she founded Cinémathèque de Tanger, a cultural centre that has become a landmark institution bringing the Moroccan community together to celebrate local and international cinema. Barrada studied History and Political Science at the Sorbonne University, Paris, and photography at the International Center of Photography, New York (1996), where she explored strategies of survival in her artwork. Engaging with the performativity of archival practices and public interventions, Barrada’s installations reinterpret social relationships, uncover subaltern histories, and reveal the prevalence of fiction in institutionalised narratives. Representing France at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026), she also participated in the Whitney Biennial (2022), and has held solo exhibitions at Mathaf, Doha (2020); Barbican Centre, London (2018) and Power Plant, Toronto (2016). As well as being a part of major museum collections worldwide, Barrada’s work has won numerous awards including the Roy R. Neuberger Prize (2019), the Marcel Duchamp Prize Paris (2016) and the Deutsche Guggenheim Artist of the Year award (2011). 

Useful Links

The Distance from Here