Before History catalogues the exhibition for the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2015, which includes a new body of work by Yto Barrada, the winner of the prize, and existing work by shortlisted artists Sarnath Banerjee, Setareh Shahbazi, and Mounira Al Solh.
The Sixth edition of the Abraaj Group Art Prize explores the layering of time through historical artifice. History here is considered as a constructed sphere, constantly in flux, simultaneously being buried and excavated. In a world of hyper-mediation, how can one construct a sense of an individual history? How does it relate to the sediments of culture? A film at the heart of Yto Barrada's new work, Faux départ (False Start) (2015), questions the veracity of artifacts in the context of modern-day museology. Through a study of paleontology in Morocco, the artist asks: How does one fabricate a history?
This special catalogue consists of two artist books, one by Yto Barrada and the other devised in collaboration with the shortlisted artists. Together they function as a sculptural object, layering on top of each other.
French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada (born 1971, lives and works in Paris and New York) is one of the most important voices in contemporary art today. Since the early 2000s, her multidisciplinary practice—films, installations, sculptures, textile works, publications, photographs, site-specific projects—has explored cultural phenomena and subaltern histories, strategies of resistance and disobedience, historical narratives and natural processes, the transmission of knowledge, and methods of archiving and collection. Undertaking long-term projects, often in collaboration with other artists, amateurs, and experts, she has successively focused on botany as politics and geography, the history of education, the economics of prehistoric fossils, postcolonial links between Morocco and the West, and a reinterpretation of the history of abstract pictorial avant-gardes to offer an alternative vision of modernity. The playful resources of language, the dynamics of translation, and the infinite possibilities of print occupy a prominent place in her practice.
Yto Barrada is the founding director of the Cinémathèque de Tanger.
She is
Hamid Barrada's daughter.
Edited by
Omar Kholeif.
Contributions by Mirene Arsanios, Yto Barrada, Sarnath Banerjee,
Omar Kholeif, Setareh Shahbazi, Mounira Al Solh.
Graphic design: Julia.
published in June 2015
English edition
20 x 27 cm (2 softcover books)
232 pages (14 b/w & 133 color ill.)
ISBN : 978-3-95679-121-5
EAN : 9783956791215
sold out
