Contemporary Translations | Group Show
30 Jan. - 28 Feb. 2026
Through the Void - Fabrizio Corneli | Exhibition view at Al-Tiba9 Gallery
Al-Tiba9 Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a group exhibition featuring works by Marina Gasparini, Rabee Baghshani, Santiago Paredes, and Serge Gualini.
The exhibition brings together four contemporary practices that explore the relationship between image and matter through digital processes and textile art.
Contemporary Translations | Group Show
EXHIBITION | 30.01 - 28.02.2026
ADDRESS | Calle Comerç 11, 08003 Barcelona.
CURATOR | Mohamed Benhadj
OPENING | 29.01.2026 at 18h30
In partnership with Istituto Italiano di Cultura - Barcelona
Bringing together four artistic practices, this exhibition operates through translation: moving between image and matter, archive and body, algorithm and authorship, and beauty and power. Marina Gasparini, Rabee Baghshani, Santiago Paredes, and Serge Gualini present works that, while diverse in form and context, share a commitment to layered narratives and to the artist’s active role in reconfiguring cultural and material systems.
Across the exhibition, the image is never treated as a fixed or autonomous surface. Instead, it is continuously embedded in textile and re-materialized, recontextualized through cultural memory, or mobilized as a site of identity and resistance. Digital technologies and historical references are not ends in themselves but starting points for transformation.
Marina Gasparini explores textiles as a living archive of knowledge and economic history and the relationship between textile production and nature. The artist activates historical systems of classification and repositions them within a contemporary visual language and constructs an ethereal garden of plant forms inspired by historical botanical manuscripts and early economic writings to question how natural resources and cultural heritage are valued and transmitted over time.
Santiago Paredes approaches image-making from a post-object perspective, where digital painting on velvet becomes a visual pleasure and cultural simulation, dissolving boundaries between art, design, and fashion. While Serge Gualini’s AI practice insists on human authorship within algorithmic production. His digital graphics and collages are resisting the immateriality of code by grounding it in historical and sculptural presence.
Blending Persian visual heritage with Western pop culture, Rabee Baghshani creates digital collages that address questions of gender, visibility, and identity. Using the image as a tool for empowerment, Baghshani enables critical resistance through contemporary narratives.
This show proposes an expanded field of contemporary practice and positions the artworks as a space of tension where meaning is neither inherited nor automated, but deliberately made.
Al-Tiba9 Gallery
Al-Tiba9 was founded in 2013 by curator Mohamed Benhadj to address contemporary art, performance, and fashion design, and it announced the opening of its art gallery in the historic center of Barcelona on the occasion of its 10th anniversary. The Born neighborhood hosts Al-Tiba9's main headquarters, including a print art magazine focusing on contemporary international artists who engender new visions about possible futures. Mohamed Benhadj's gallery, which operates under Al-Tiba9 Contemporary, is the first international art gallery founded by an Algerian curator in Barcelona.
The space was built by José Fontseré Mestre, a figure of the Catalan modernism, and has 300 m2. Likewise, it is located five minutes from the Picasso Museum, Moco Museum, MEAM European Museum of Modern Art, and El Born CCM. The gallery seeks to be a bridge between the MENA region and Europe, a solid link between the East and the West by offering the world a unique experience of creativity, possibility, and growth like no other around the globe.
