The Fondazione Merz is pleased to present DEADHEAD, a solo exhibition by artist Yto Barrada, curated by Davide Quadrio with Giulia Turconi, in collaboration with the MAO (Museo d’Arte Orientale), from Wednesday February 19 to Sunday May 18, 2025.

The exhibition’s title, DEADHEAD, refers in part to the horticultural practice of removing dead flower heads to stimulate the growth of the entire plant. Taking up the notion of reducing to the essential, the show draws on a tight selection from Yto Barrada’s artistic oeuvre, including films, sculptures, installations, textiles and prints, some of which have been specially created for the occasion.

Among the echoes, call-outs and visual experiments in the exhibition, one reference is to Barrada’s research into the pioneer colour theorist collector and philanthropist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel and her book, Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color (1902) originally intended for a female readership of dressmakers, flower painters and decorators. The author’s revolutionary colour-analysis charts converted images into geometric grids, through a systematic arrangement of the colour spectrum, which she dubbed the “music of light.”

With the series Color Analysis, which debuted at the MAO (Museo d’Arte Orientale) as part of the exhibition Trad u/i zioni d’Eurasia (2023-24), Barrada presents hand-dyed velvet grids, in which she applied Vanderpoel’s technique to transform images from Vanderpoel’s personal collection of antiques, to selected works from the MAO’s collection of Islamic art, and to a drawing by Marisa Merz. Many natural dyes used in the work were made in The Mothership, an artist-led project by Barrada envisioned as an ‘ecofeminist-campus’ for growing, making, and learning natural dyes and radical indigenous lost traditions, in her garden in Tangier.