ASIA NOW 2026

The fair coincides with David Medalla, Le Désir Cinéti que..., on view at Baró Paris through October 24.

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 Dala guete, in Cebu, he proposed transforming a small coral island into a giant turtle, a project that mobilized 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 village. Three ideas from this story resonate across the booth: a curious, play ful 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 disappe ars 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 combine bodies, animals, plants and hybrid beings drawn from mythologies, folklore and inherited images, in which human and non­human life appear entangled. What con nects the works is not a shared mythology or a single nar rative, but the possibility of imagining the world differently, as a living, collective and unfinished process.

David Medalla (b. 1938, Manila, Philippines; d. 2020, Ma nila, Philippines) was a pioneer of kinetic, participatory and performance art. Settling in London in the early 1960s, he co-founded Signals, a gallery and journal that became a meeting point for an international generation of artists, and in 1967 founded the performance group the Explo ding Galaxy. His participatory piece A Stitch in Time, first realized in 1968, invited the public to embroider fabric with personal objects. Paris also played a role in his trajectory: in 1960, philosopher Gaston Bachelard introduced his first performance in France, and he later lectured at the Sorbonne. His work was shown at the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Art Moderne in 1996, and at the Jeu de Paume in 2013. Medalla took part in When Attitudes Beco me Form (1969), documenta 5 (1972) and the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), and his work is held in collections inclu ding the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and M+, Hong Kong.

Mamali Shafahi (b. 1982, Iran) and Domenico Gutknecht (b. 1987, Germany) are an artist duo based in Marseille. Their collaborative practice spans installation, sculpture, painting and hybrid multimedia environments, developed through a shared interest in transformation, mythology and the por ous boundaries between the real and the fantastical. Paris has long been part of their trajectory. Shafahi trained at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Paris–Cergy, held solo exhibitions at Galerie Nicolas Silin between 2010 and 2013, and took part in Prince.sse.s des villes at the Palais de Tokyo in 2019. In 2024, the duo presented Rest in Peace at Art Paris, followed by Eternal Rest, a solo booth at ARCOmadrid in 2025. Shafahi’s work has also been shown at the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, and the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. With Baró, they took part in Cannibal Nature, a group exhibition curated by Rolando J. Carmona at Baró Mallorca in 2025, and most recently presented Tales from the Garden, a solo exhibi tion at Baró Mallorca in 2026.