“When I moved from Tangier to New York in 2012, my galleries were a bit concerned: what would I have to say, once I no longer lived atop the source of all my preoccupations? I discovered there was Another Tangier. An island in Chesapeake bay of Virginia, just a few hours drive from NYC… and a little research revealed that not only did this Tangier have a particular name – it was, like the Moroccan version, one of the more interesting places on earth.
This insular culture has preserved a heirloom variety of British-English, spiced with the twang of the American South, rendered even more impenetrable by a local idiomatic patois. An unattractive person “ain’t hard favored;” to a smelly person, you might say “Wait a bit, you’re sweet!” And best of all, of a woman who, like me, talks a lot, Tangiermen would say: "She could talk a flood tide down."
- Yto Barrada, 2022
Goodman Gallery is pleased to present She Could Talk a Flood Tide Down, Yto Barrada's first solo exhibition in Johannesburg and the first with the gallery. By bringing together diverse projects, the exhibition highlights Barrada's long-established interest in alternative forms of learning, such as mnemonics and spaces of play, as a valuable source of knowledge. The exhibition coincides with Barrada's solo presentation at The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Yto Barrada: Ways to Baffle the Wind, on view until July 2023.