Yto Barrada to Open the French Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Art Biennale

The "Like Saturn" Project

In Comme Saturne, Yto Barrada revives the cosmological imagery associated with the planet of melancholy, withdrawal, and slow thought. Even before taking shape within the pavilion’s space, the project emerges through a process of experimentation rooted in association and constraint: one word evokes another, a technique opens the door to a myth, a color refers to a material history, and an error becomes a gesture. “Dévoré” is the textile finishing technique that provides the artist with the paradoxical and unsettling starting point for her new research, echoing the revolutionary phrase, “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”

The pavilion unfolds like a suite for Saturn, proceeding in sequences and repetitions. At the threshold, a goat-leather kite symbolically connects heaven and earth. The Room of Folds, draped in wool and gradually bleached by daylight, creates a dialogue between cosmic time and the mythical time of Cronos. At the center, a wheel of rules and constraints borrowed from the OuLiPo evokes the language games that run throughout the entire project. The Work Room explores the Saturnalia and the inversion of hierarchies, while the Study Room is rooted in The Mothership, a garden of colored plants that the artist created in Tangier, where natural color becomes a collective body of knowledge shared among artists, artisans, and gardeners.

Finally, the Salle du dévoré gives form to Saturnian violence: the material, literally corroded by acid, produces an economy of the fragment where wear, abrasion, and formlessness become aesthetic and political strategies. Like Saturn offers not so much an escape as a tool for poetic survival, somewhere between derision, anxiety, and seriousness—a way not to remain melancholic, but to lucidly inhabit the world’s instability.

The Catalog

Alongside the Pavilion, this publication will document the research conducted by Yto Barrada for her project Like Saturn. Its release in the summer of 2026 will allow for the inclusion of exhibition views and provide a detailed account of the artist’s most recent experiments in the fields of language, color, and material culture.

The book opens with a glossary presenting terms related to dyeing, fabrics, and textile techniques, which served as the foundation for Yto Barrada’s works and installations created for the pavilion. In this glossary, polysemic terms—to sadden, exhaustion, devoured, lacuna, or lining—whose meanings shift depending on the context of utterance and production—are highlighted, setting the tone for a certain freedom from the authority of established knowledge.

The core of the publication consists of “plates” in which, in each instance, the image takes center stage and the text is placed in the margins, thereby subverting Western bookish conventions and the academic primacy of the textual over the visual.
Just as the margins take center stage in the pavilion, the illustrations and footnotes take precedence here, accompanied by commentary. A detail of a work, a view of a studio or exhibition, an iconographic reference, or a snapshot of the creative process engage in dialogue with annotations, quotations, and oral accounts to put into practice an aesthetic of relationship, of branching structures, and of thought in motion. In this “subjective encyclopedia,” the reader branches off and drifts at the whim of associations and cross-references, particularly to the introductory glossary. In doing so, the book is woven from numerous perspectives and vanishing points that extend the experience of the Venice exhibition.

The book also includes an introduction by Myriam Ben Salah, director of the Renaissance Society (Chicago) and curator of the pavilion, an essay by Arnaud Dubois, an anthropologist of color (CNRS) and scientific advisor to the pavilion, and a previously unpublished contribution by the historian and Oulipian writer Marcel Bénabou.

The French Pavilion's International Impact

To extend and promote the French Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, the Institut français, in partnership with its cultural network abroad, is developing international extensions of Yto Barrada’s work, in collaboration with her curator, Myriam Ben Salah. Launched before, during, and after the Biennale Arte, these initiatives take the form of conversations, screenings, exhibitions, workshops, and residencies, and are held in locations connected to the artist’s career, from New Delhi to Paris, from London to Tangier.

Yto Barrada’s first “Resonance” event took place at KHOJ in New Delhi, organized by the French Institute in India in partnership with the India Art Fair, during a conversation between the artist and Indian curator Anushka Rajendran (Prameya Art Foundation), alongside the artist’s creative residency in Kerala in May 2025 to prepare for the exhibition *Estranged Geographies* at Durbar Hall (Kochi).

The second took place in London during the Frieze Art Fair, featuring the artist’s first public conversation with her curator, Myriam Ben Salah, at the Institut français de Londres in October 2025, to mark the 15th anniversary of Fluxus art projects. This event coincided with Yto Barrada’s solo exhibition at the South London Gallery: Yto Barrada: Thrill, Fill and Spill.

In Paris, two related events were planned. In the fall, the artist and her curator met with directors of major international museums participating in the Institut français’s Focus Visual Arts program during Art Basel Paris week.

At the end of 2025, the artist participated in the Franco-Indian festival at the Mobilier National, “Ce qui se trame – Stories Woven Between India and France,” an exceptional event dedicated to textile creation, at the intersection of contemporary art and artistic craftsmanship. On this occasion, one of the artist’s textile works was featured in the exhibition, and a discussion took place between Yto Barrada and publisher and art critic Clément Dirié on December 7, 2025.

A new edition is scheduled to take place in Tangier from July 10 to 12, 2026, marking the 20th anniversary of the Cinémathèque co-founded by Yto Barrada, prior to the international tour of the French Pavilion following the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.