Amid the current of North African contemporary art, few voices have emerged as distinctly as that of Moroccan artist Hiba Baddou. With ‘Paraboles: La Sacralisation des Images’, recipient of Saatchi Gallery’s Art for Change global award in 2024, she registers a multidisciplinary contribution to the evolving discourse on migration. Comprising a short film, a series of photographs and calligraphic works, the project, deeply rooted in Moroccan history, engages the imaginary to universalise shared human experiences.

The child of a diplomat and an artist, Baddou developed a sensitivity to the myriad of subcultures she encountered, nurturing a questioning gaze that would later shape her artistic path. She has gone on to explore various forms of creative expression (drawing, painting, sculpture) but it’s in the craft of cinema that she is fulfilling her calling as a storyteller. “I started with photography; learning to frame, to freeze a moment, to tell a story in a single image,” Baddou recalls. “But soon, I felt the need to go further: to bring movement, breath, time itself into the picture. Cinema became a natural choice. It’s an art of life, of collaboration, of many voices coming together.”

She studied Art Direction at the renowned Penninghen School in Paris after earning a degree in Screenwriting and Directing from the International Film School in 2018, where she received the EICAR Award for Best Directing and Best Cinematography. Perhaps a child prodigy, it was only a few years into her artistic career that ‘Paraboles: La Sacralisation des Images’ was presented at the highly selective International Pavilion of the 2024 Dakar Biennial.

Her practice, which treats themes of identity, rituals and language, makes use of retrofuturist aesthetics while drawing inspiration from Moroccan cultural heritage. Her art does not merely depict the country’s traditions or the chants of the collective but the complexities that lie in between and within each myth echoing in spoken narratives – the quiet tensions between old and new – that give life to contemporary storytelling.

When conceptualizing the project, she recalled departing Rabat at 18 – leaving behind the familiar; her family, the places, stories and memories that shaped her worldview. In doing so, Baddou was confronted with pressing questions of identity. In this unsettled state, where belonging was cast into flux, a deeper dialogue with the world began to take shape: a mediation between uprootedness and rootedness, a paradoxical departure from conventional understandings of conditional ties, and an inquiry into the events that give rise to such disruptions.

This intimate tension found an entanglement in Morocco’s own encounter with modernity, revealing an intricate dynamic between tradition and transformation. It harks back to the 1980s, when couscous steamers began to appear on rooftops, gradually giving way to the satellite dishes we see today. These technologies – informal and formal respectively – marked the dawn of a new way of life, allowing Moroccans to watch Western TV. This early act, which stood as a means to bypass censorship, revealed images of distant worlds. It was a new mode to life – one that instilled a shift in mentality while awakening a desire to escape towards new beginnings, particularly in the West, though these often-proved deceiving.

“When we idealise a place without seeing it, we build dreams from images, stories, hopes that don’t always match reality,” she says. “That dream feeds ambition, hope for a better future, sometimes the need to leave. Yet this idealisation is always incomplete, because you only truly grasp what you leave behind after you’ve left.”

The title ‘Paraboles’ invites a word play, bridging the sacred and the narrative, the technological and the allegorical. In French, a parabole is both a parable (an instructive story layered with meaning) and a satellite dish that transmits images across borders. The oscillation between these two registers signals how the images we receive, whether through ancient oral traditions or modern technologies, are never neutral. They carry myths, promises and distortions.

From this vantage point, Baddou draws a compelling connection between the notions of hope, dream, ambition and exile, and that of rootedness. She emphasises that it is in leaving one’s home that the power of roots is revealed most fully. The common expectation that uprootedness must accompany leaving one’s origins – often feared in our societies – is here countered by a stronger anchoring in one’s culture, whether this takes the form of a return or a search for meaning. She turns her lens towards the fragile yet powerful act of interpretation: how individuals and societies construct truth, identity and belonging from fragments of memory, ritual and imagery.

“Exile is geographic, rootedness is spiritual. They aren’t opposites, but deeply linked. In my work, I try to capture this tension between dreaming of elsewhere and the pull of where you come from; a pull that always catches up with you,” she says.

The film opens in Douar Hajja, a neighborhood on Rabat’s periphery that she has long explored and reimagined as the Hertz Republic in her series. Rooftops bristle with satellite dishes, looming over nearly shuttered windows. A sacred book is read from top to bottom, grounding oneself deeper in transmitted values. Yet the parabole, the satellite dish, and the agal (a traditional Arab accessory typically worn by men to secure the headdress) each imbued with numinous forces, stand sentinel over those who seek a world unbound. Baddou’s imaginary Hertzian calligraphic works adorn a passport stamped along the journey between earth and sky, purporting the depth of ‘Paraboles: La Sacralisation des Images’ into spatial dimensions through a dialogue between Hans Voth’s cosmic architectures and the project’s photographic gaze.

Here, tension becomes balance and form becomes meaning, amid futurist semiotics, mythic representations and the memories of the land. Her work offers a fresh take on introspection, weaving reflective geometric surfaces and the divine, celestial connotations with Voth’s creations. Meanwhile, warmth and the familiar emanate from the desert sand and the mud used in constructing these ambitious vestiges.

As Baddou explains, “These architectures propose another way of inhabiting the world – quieter, more cosmic, more introspective. The City of Orion appears as a tangible utopia. The Golden Spiral invokes the divine proportions of nature, the Fibonacci sequence. The Stairway to Heaven becomes an ascent toward the invisible, at once myth and mirage,” she concludes.

Her project underscores the paradox of migration as both loss and revelation, a rupture that unsettles yet clarifies. The search for meaning is not presented as a definitive resolution but as an ongoing negotiation. For, the sacred resides less in fixed answers than in the act of questioning – a wonderment symbolically sustained in her work through the vertical mark representing the Hertzian Republic, a gaze toward the sky; an upward rootedness. That, in parallel, sustains the universality of human experience and the deepening of identity, where exile becomes unattainable. Because in the wonder, it is not the wonderful beauty that is beautiful but the beauty of wonderment.

Hiba Baddou is currently represented by Loft Art Gallery. Her exhibition, ‘Paraboles – Une Odyssée Hertzienne’ is on view at MACAAL, Marrakech, until December 7, 2025.