Marrakech – The Musee d’Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden (MACAAL) in Marrakech, in collaboration with the Institut Français du Maroc, launched this evening a solo exhibition by Moroccan artist Hiba Baddou.
Themed “Paraboles, A Hertzian Odyssey,” the show will run until December 7, inviting audiences into a journey where technology, memory, and imagination meet.
From the very first room, the atmosphere feels charged with invisible frequencies. Baddou transforms the museum’s Artist Room into a space of transmission, where everyday objects and ancestral gestures take on new meanings.
A couscoussier becomes an antenna; a calligraphic line turns into a signal; a sculpture captures the invisible waves and shadows that surround us.
At the center of her research stands the parabolic antenna, once a common sight on rooftops across Morocco.
In Baddou’s hands, it becomes more than a tool for receiving television channels; it emerges as a poetic symbol of desire, displacement, and reception.
The antenna transmits not only images from elsewhere, but also questions: What happens to intimacy when our living rooms are flooded with signals from beyond? How does heritage adapt when modernity colonizes even the smallest fragments of daily life?
An invitation to slow down
Through photography, calligraphy, installation, and film, Baddou explores the fragile balance between collective memory and digital saturation.
She shows how traditions are reinvented, how objects of hospitality and community become channels for global flows, and how the horizontal connections of the digital world have shifted the vertical links that once bound us to the spiritual and the sensible.
But Paraboles, A Hertzian Odyssey is not only an observation, it is also an act of resistance through imagination. In a time of overexposure, Baddou suggests slowing down, observing, and listening to the inaudible.
Each work is a fragment, a resonance, a perception, offering visitors a mental space where identity can be reclaimed and freedom redefined.
With this opening, MACAAL is looking to reaffirm its commitment to the mission of making contemporary African art accessible, of building bridges between local heritage and global concerns, and of supporting artists who experiment boldly with the languages of today.
In Baddou’s odyssey, the visitor is not only a spectator but a participant, invited to tune into invisible frequencies, to read parables written in waves and shadows, and to imagine new forms of liberation.
