France

Comme Saturne proceeds through a constellation of gestures and words drawn from the long history of textile work. Yto Barrada constructs an exhibition that unfolds through a series of environments: a peristyle of suspended shapes; a room dedicated to Saturn structured by folded wool and weighted matter; spaces devoted to work and exhaustion; and zones where machines stall, colours fade and gestures repeat out of sync.

The exhibition title invokes the dual nature of Saturn: both the figure who devours his own children in order to suspend generation, and the planet under whose influence artists were said to be born. By returning to this cosmological imagination, Barrada adopts a position of distance through which to reflect on our contemporary condition through a poetic lens.

Barrada’s artistic method, one of consumption and erosion, finds a direct material analogue in the textile technique of dévoré, in which matter is selectively eaten away. Embedded in this gesture is a melancholia of exhaustion, attuned to a moment of political and ecological burnout.

Oral, artisanal and often feminine modes of creation and learning shape the project from below, as structure rather than subject matter. Abstraction emerges through colour systems, rhythms and constraints. Time is arrhythmic and composed of pauses, repetitions and returns: comme Saturne.