underground

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With »Underground«, Galerie 3AP presents the first solo exhibition by Roberto Barbosa. The exhibition unfolds across both the gallery space and the building’s historic air-raid shelter, which has been regularly activated for site-specific artistic interventions since the gallery’s founding. Between these two spaces, Barbosa develops an installation-based choreography in which architecture emerges not as a backdrop, but as a carrier of memory, imagination, and embodied experience.

Barbosa’s artistic practice encompasses video, performance, photography, drawing, as well as sculptural miniatures and architectural models. From these elements, he constructs spatial scenarios that function as portals between reality and fiction, memory and projection. In his video works, he activates these constructed worlds through performative engagement with his own body. Architecture becomes a site where identity, desire, and belonging are continuously renegotiated. Drawing on his perspective as a queer person, Barbosa creates fictional spaces that challenge social norms and imagine alternative forms of living together.

At the center of the exhibition is the video work “Nepantlera” (2023), produced during an artist residency in Iceland. Drawing on the Nahuatl concept of nepantla – a liminal space between the material and spiritual worlds – Barbosa develops the figure of the Nepantlera as a being that traverses multiple realities and states of consciousness. Here, the body appears as a medium of transformation, connecting nature, spirituality, and lived social experience.

The photographic work “Mi Casa” (2024) expands this investigation through questions of home, memory, and self-construction. The house is understood not as a fixed place, but as a psychological and emotional space continually reshaped through migration, intimacy, and personal history. Barbosa’s miniatures further develop these themes: as models of imagined architectures, they merge object, symbol, and space, forming the point of departure for sculptural constellations in which scale, materiality, and spatial perception are continuously shifted.

With »Underground«, this body of work enters into a direct dialogue with the architecture of the gallery. The historic air-raid shelter becomes an integral part of the exhibition’s spatial narrative, extending Barbosa’s exploration of liminal spaces, places of refuge, and processes of transformation. The exhibition approaches architecture as a living framework in which body, space, and imagination continually generate and reshape one another.

opening 30.08.2026, 6-9 PM, curated by Aileen Treusch