Underground
September 3, 2026 – October 20, 2026
Roberto Barbosa
Galerie 3AP
With *Underground*, die Galerie presents Roberto Barbosa’s first solo exhibition. The exhibition spans the gallery space and the building’s historic air-raid shelter, which has been regularly used for site-specific artistic interventions since the gallery’s founding. Between the two spaces, Barbosa unfolds an installation-based choreography in which architecture appears not as a backdrop, but as a vessel for memory, imagination, and physical experience.
Barbosa’s artistic practice encompasses video, performance, photography, drawing, as well as sculptural miniatures and architectural models. From these, he develops spatial scenarios that function as portals between reality and fiction, memory and projection. In his video works, he activates these constructed worlds performatively using his own body. Architecture thus becomes a place where identity, desire, and belonging are constantly renegotiated. Drawing on his perspective as a queer person, Barbosa designs fictional spaces that challenge social norms and imagine alternative forms of coexistence.
At the heart of the exhibition is the video work *Nepantlera* (2023), created during a residency in Iceland. Drawing on the Nahuatl term *nepantla*—a liminal space between the material and spiritual worlds—Barbosa develops the figure of the *Nepantlera* as a being that traverses different realities and states of consciousness. Here, the body appears as a medium of transformation and a link between nature, spirituality, and social experience.
The photographic work *Mi Casa* (2024) expands this exploration to include questions of home, memory, and self-definition. The house does not appear as a fixed location, but rather as a psychological and emotional space that is constantly being reshaped by migration, intimacy, and personal history. Barbosa’s miniatures address these themes: as models of imagined architectures, they combine object, symbol, and space, forming the starting point for installation-based constellations in which scale, materiality, and spatial perception are continually shifted.
With *Underground*, this body of work enters into a direct dialogue with the gallery’s architecture. The historic air-raid shelter becomes part of the spatial narrative and expands Barbosa’s interest in liminal spaces, places of retreat, and processes of transformation. The exhibition conceives of architecture as a living fabric in which bodies, space, and imagination mutually generate one another.