For over two decades, Yto Barrada’s work has dwelled in the borderlands, between continents, between histories, between what is remembered and what is erased. Thrill, Fill and Spill, Barrada’s new exhibition at South London Gallery, folds the artist’s investigations of resistance and erased histories into colour theory, ecology, abstraction, and her hometown of Tangier.
The exhibition title references a traditional rule for gardening arrangements: a focal plant (thriller), companions (fillers) and those that trail or overflow (spillers). Barrada turns this popular design concept into an allegory for creative thought – anchoring, accumulating, overflowing.
Colour becomes both medium and metaphor. All of the textiles on view were dyed with plants grown at The Mothership, Barrada’s artist-led eco-campus and dye garden in her hometown of Tangier. These plants have colonial histories, carrying with them lineages of labour and appropriation. She invites us to see colour as both a form of knowledge and a site of struggle, to look at what has been dyed and what has been washed away. “I think of dyeing as transversal,” she says, “in that it has the beauty of the history of art — it touches industrial development and technology and science — and it is also still considered a female low art.”
In Colour Analysis (Tintin in Palestine, 1 and 2) (2025), Barrada subjects two versions of Hergé’s cartoon to a forensic kind of abstraction. The 1930s original version depicted Tintin as a reporter in British Mandate Palestine, where he encounters forces of Palestinian resistance and the Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary group who opposed British limitations on Jewish immigration. Later, 1970s versions of the comic shifted the setting to the fictional Middle Eastern country of Khemed, removing references to Palestine and the Irgun.
Using Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s 1902 colour grid method – an early, overlooked system of colour analysis – Barrada translates the comic’s panels into colour studies. The result is a diagram of redaction and a study in the politics of disappearance.
Tangier Island Wall (2019) links the artist’s home of Tangier in Morocco to another Tangier, an island off the coast of Virginia. This island’s small community and their crab fishing livelihood is threatened by rising sea levels due to the climate crisis. Barrada’s porous ‘seawall’ of crab traps references the inhabitants’ wish for a seawall to protect the island. The artist describes this as a ‘beau geste’ – a noble act, but one that is ultimately futile. Here, the crab traps are arranged in a circle to echo the shapes found in the SLG’s Orozco Garden. Works such as Untitled (13 maquettes for MoMA PS1 Courtyard Commission “Le Grand Soir”) (2025) revisit the acrobatic human pyramids of Morocco as models of both resistance and solidarity.
At its core, the show reflects Barrada’s view of art as a means of building community. As part of the exhibition, British-Japanese artist Emma Ogawa Todd took part in a residency at The Mothership. Inspired by her residency she has developed participatory workshops for young people and schools at the gallery. As Sarah Allen, SLG’s Head of Programme and the exhibition’s curator, notes: “Barrada is a polyphonic artist whose practice extends far beyond exhibition gallery walls. I felt Yto was an ideal artist to showcase at the SLG for the singular way she excavates histories and resists master narratives balancing beauty and play with wry wit — and for her deep attunement to place and community, values central to the SLG’s work.”
Yto Barrada: Thrill, Fill and Spill is on view at South London Gallery through 11 January 2026
