There are artworks that work on the viewer’s apprehension of an implied absence, and then there are artworks that simply stand there waiting for that apparent lack to be filled in by contextualizing talk. The former has something to do with aesthetic experience, the latter with a loss of interest in it, and standing among Yto Barrada’s work at Pace Gallery London, I get the feeling the talk wins. Paris-born, French-Algerian Barrada lives in works in Tangier. Barrada is a lot of things: artist, filmmaker, photographer, cultural activist, and, since 2006, director and co-founder of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, now a vibrant art cinema and cultural center. The persistent focus of Barrada’s work is the cultural and social predicament of Morocco and its people—the vagaries of its political history, the impact of migration and globalization—and Barrada’s earlier education in political science informs works that mix bleak humor and a melancholic sense of stasis with an attention to the narratives of power. This Pace Gallery London show of older and newer work recaps some of Barrada’s ongoing concerns. The brightly colored geometric forms of the “Autocar” photographic series (2004) turn out to be the logos of the buses that traverse the Straits of …