Yto Barrada: Thrill, Fill and Spill at the South London Gallery
Next Friday, 26 September, the South London Gallery (SLG) opens Thrill, Fill and Spill, a solo exhibition by French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada. Recently selected to represent France at the 2026 Venice Biennale, Barrada is celebrated for her multidisciplinary approach, weaving together film, sculpture, painting, and textiles to probe questions of colonial history, borderlands, and strategies of resistance.
Yto Barrada, A day is a day, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery.
At SLG, Barrada brings new and existing works into dialogue, extending her exploration of cultural phenomena while venturing into colour theory, abstraction, and climate change. The title, borrowed from a familiar gardening maxim for designing flower beds, is playfully applied to the gallery context: a meditation on spectacle, density, and overflow.
Yto Barrada, The Mothership, Tangier, Morocco. Photo: courtesy of Artangel
Textiles are central to the exhibition. Several pieces were created at The Mothership, Barrada’s artist-led natural dye centre and residency space in Tangier, Morocco, where artists, gardeners, and researchers grow pigments on the land and experiment with their resulting sustainable colours. One of these is Tintin in Palestine, a silk textile work translating Hergé’s cartoon into geometric grids based on Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s 1902 colour-analysis system. The piece highlights the differing versions of Tintin’s adventures published under the British Mandate of Palestine, underscoring how narratives can shift and sometimes distort across time and context.
Yto Barrada, Untitled (Sunrise/Highway X), 2025. Cotton, velvet, dye from plant extracts.
Photo: Annik Wetter, Courtesy the Artist.
Other works foreground Barrada’s interest in borders, structures, and the precarity of communities. Tangier Island Wall (2019), shown here in the UK for the first time, is a sculpture made of crab traps that references the Chesapeake Bay community whose livelihood and very landmass are threatened by rising seas. The porous “wall” points to the futility of building barriers against ecological catastrophe in what Barrada calls a beau geste, a noble but doomed gesture — yet its woven mesh of traps also echoes the latticework of nets and textiles, porous and permeable, refusing neat boundaries.
Yto Barrada, Tangier Island Wall (Detail), 2019. Crab pots, charcoal.
Meanwhile, Acrobatic Formations revisits the tradition of human pyramids in Morocco, once a tactic of warfare and spiritual practice, later adapted into acrobatic performance and circus spectacle. Fourteen wooden models capture both the physical ingenuity and the shifting meanings of these formations, reflecting Barrada’s fascination with how collective human structures evolve across cultures and centuries.
Curated by Sarah Allen in dialogue with the artist, the exhibition also embraces cultural exchange through residencies and workshops connected to The Mothership. Like much of Barrada’s work — from her founding of the Cinémathèque de Tanger to her continued emphasis on shared knowledge — Thrill, Fill and Spill situates textiles in art not only as an aesthetic experience but as a catalyst for community, dialogue, and resistance.
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Further Information:
Yto Barrada: Thrill, Fill and Spill runs from 26 September 2025 to 11 January 2026 at the South London Gallery.
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Image credits:
Lead: Yto Barrada, Untitled (After Stella, Sidi Ifni IV), 2023. Cotton, dye from plant extracts. © Yto Barrada, courtesy Pace Gallery.
All other images as credited in photo captions.