Asia NOW 2026: Booth H11

Baró is pleased to announce its first participation in Asia NOW with A World in the Making, a presentation that places David Medalla (1938–2020, Manila, Philippines) in dialogue with the artist duo Mamali Shafahi (b. 1982, Iran) and Domenico Gutknecht (b. 1987, Germany). The booth brings together one of Medalla's Bubble Machine sculptures, a selection of his drawings and paintings, and a group of medium-scale reliefs by Shafahi and Gutknecht, while the duo's outdoor fountain, Aura, is installed in the courtyard of the Monnaie de Paris. It coincides with David Medalla, Le Désir Cinétique..., on view at Baró Paris through 24 October.

A World in the Making takes its cue from a childhood story Medalla recounted in 1964, in a short text titled On My First Sculpture. At the age of nine, in the coastal town of Dalaguete, in Cebu, he proposed transforming a small coral island into a giant tortoise, a project that brought together much of his family and practically the entire village. Medalla later concluded that the sculpture was not exactly his creation, but belonged to the whole town. Three ideas from this story resonate across the booth: a curious, playful gaze that understands the world as something still in the making; the collective nature of artistic creation; and our relationship with nature and the non-human. Medalla's Bubble Machine, whose foam rises, spills over and disappears only to begin again, its forms shaped by the interplay of water and air, offers an image of a world in the making. Shafahi and Gutknecht, in turn, draw on a historical and symbolic imaginary larger than themselves. Their reliefs bring together bodies, animals, plants and hybrid beings drawn from mythologies, folklore and inherited images, in which human and non-human life appear entangled. What connects the works is not a shared mythology or a single narrative, but the possibility of imagining the world differently, as a living, collective and unfinished process.

Presentation Text