Yto Barrada: Comme Saturne

Yto Barrada represents France at the 61st Venice Biennale with Comme Saturne, curated by Myriam Ben Salah.  

During the Renaissance, artists were believed to be born under Saturn, the planet of melancholy, withdrawal, and slow thought. Barrada reactivates this cosmological figure and extends it across ritual and material processes, guided by her long-standing engagement with language and textile practices. 

The title echoes a well-known phrase from the French Revolution—“Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children”—and finds material counterpart in dévoré, a textile technique in which the surface pile of a fabric is chemically dissolved so that form emerges through absence. At once destructive and generative, this gesture anchors the exhibition’s inquiry into time and erosion. 

Conceived as a suite for Saturn, the pavilion unfolds through sequences and reprises. Visitors move through draped environments composed of wool, mechanical systems, and transformed objects. Daylight acts as a material in its own right, gradually bleaching and altering the textiles over the course of the exhibition.

A central work, the “wheel of rules and constraints” pays homage to the  French collective OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) a key influence on the project alongside Saturn. As in their practice, constraint becomes a generative principle: repetition, permutation, play, and disruption generate new forms and associations. The project also resonates with The Mothership—Barrada’s dye garden, residency space and research site in Tangier. 

An archaeological artifact from the site of the Château de Gambais—used as a filming location for Jacques Demy’s musical Peau d’âne (1970)—extends this saturnian trajectory. Unearthed through excavation, it repositions cinema and folklore within the material strata of childhood memories. 

Moving between cosmology and labor, agriculture and abstraction, Comme Saturne considers cycles of generation and exhaustion, transmission and loss. Across textiles, film, sculpture, and language, Barrada constructs a space in which fragmentation, wear, and formlessness operate as both aesthetic and political strategies.

Comme Saturne proposes less an escape than a tool for poetic survival: a way of inhabiting the instability of the present without surrendering to melancholy.

“Yto Barrada composes a body of work in which modest gestures, fragile memories, and long-marginalized narratives intersect, and I am delighted that the French Pavilion—fully renovated after a year of work—now hosts an exhibition that reflects her so precisely.”
—Eva Nguyen Binh, President of the Institut français

A fully illustrated catalogue, published by JRP|Editions in partnership with the Institut français, will be released in summer 2026. Bringing together installation views and recent research, it foregrounds image over text through a sequence of plates, where marginalia and footnotes take precedence—extending the exhibition’s reversal of hierarchies into book form.

Performance program
May 7, 4pm, Saadet Türköz, Conversation with Saturn
May 8, 5:30pm, Walid Ben Selim and Marie-Marguerite Cano, Here and now