Yto Barrada / Latoya Ruby Frazier
16 October 2015–13 March 2016
Carré d’Art–Musée d’art contemporain
Place de la Maison Carrée
30000 Nîmes
France
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm
T +33 (0)4 66 76 35 70
F +33 (0)4 66 76 35 85
info [at] carreartmusee.com
Yto Barrada was born in Paris in 1971 and is currently living in New York and Tangiers. Her early projects in the late ’90s were in connection with the Moroccan city of Tangiers. In them she revealed the processes of globalization and individuals’ hopes for possible emigration to Europe. The project on show at Nîmes carries on her exploration of the Moroccan identity, the question of origins, and arrangements for collecting and displaying at natural history, ethnography and archaeology museums. In it she thinks through the status of the archives and industry developed around archaeological digs. This whole set of items and pictures tells us individual stories, but also shows the way in which we can recount history through the collecting of objects, the making of artifacts and their display in museum facilities that evolve over time.
LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982) takes as the subject of her photographs her home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, or rather the people who live there. Braddock is a working-class suburb of Pittsburgh, where there used to be a large steelworking industry. For a number of years, she has been working on those close to her and taking them as witnesses to the economic slump. Her work belongs to a long tradition of committed photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Gordon Parks. She is interested in three generations of women: her photos keep coming back to her grandmother, her mother, and self-portraits. Going beyond the bounds of the documentary photograph, LaToya Ruby Frazier produces complex compositions with multiple centrings and mises en abyme, calling on the performative gesture.
Catalogue of the exhibition LaToya Ruby Frazier: Bilingual (French/English). Texts by Cecilia Alemani, Natalie Zelt & Cherise Smith. 56 pages.
Curator: Jean-Marc Prevost
*Top: Barrada, Untitled (painted educational boards found in Natural History Museum, never opened, Azilal, Morocco), 2013–15. © Yto Barrada 2015. Courtesy Pace London & Sfeir-Semler Gallery. Bottom: Latoya Ruby Frazier,Pier 54, A Human Right to Passage, 2014. © 2014 LaToya Ruby Frazier, Liz Ligon & Friends of the High Line. Courtesy Galerie Michel Rein, Paris. Photo: Liz Ligon.
