Swab Foundation
Through its foundation, Swab Barcelona promotes experimentation, research, and the dissemination of new artistic practices that move beyond the traditional models of cultural institutions, creating spaces that question and redefine the role of an international contemporary art fair.
Through its own curatorial programme, the Swab Barcelona Foundation invites collectives, independent spaces, and non-profit emerging projects to take part in the fair, exploring new forms of exchange through an ecosocial perspective on art and strengthening networks of solidarity that transcend geographical boundaries with a global outlook.
Thanks to public and private support, together with the Swab Friends community, the Foundation promotes initiatives that expand the scope of traditional market-oriented thinking, exploring new economies and discourses for emerging artistic practices and the concerns of younger generations.
Among these initiatives are Polar & Tropic, which fosters collaborative networks between Nordic and Southeast Asian spaces, and Vortex, focused on exchanges between local and Latin American projects. In both cases, geographical distance and the diversity of contexts become the starting point for dialogue: spaces where differences are not obstacles but sources of value and collective enrichment. Finally, Swab’s new programme, OFF-site, presents galleries that challenge conventional gallery formats by engaging with disused spaces and new rural contexts.
The Foundation also incorporates time-based formats such as performance, video, and conversation into the fair. Swab Radio serves as a platform for knowledge exchange and as an open archive of the ideas circulating through each edition, with materials accessible throughout the year.
Initiatives and Projects
Public Program
The Public Program expands the curatorial content of each edition, both within the fair and across the city, through gatherings, radio broadcasts, talks, and workshops connected to the different programs, strengthening the links between projects, audiences, and the urban context.
The program functions as a platform for encounter, exchange, and collective creation, generating in each edition a shared archive of materials, conversations, and experiences among all participants.
In collaboration with local projects, the program’s content extends throughout the city, bringing these practices to new audiences and fostering participation, cultural mediation, and community-building around contemporary art.
My First Art Fair (MyFaf)
With the aim of promoting new voices in contemporary art and facilitating their access to the international art fair circuit, the MYFAF program grants three selected galleries a free stand, offering them the opportunity to present their proposals at an international fair for the first time.
Conceived as a space for learning and visibility, the program enables the presentation of projects of high cultural value without the economic pressure associated with conventional circuits. This condition encourages the exploration of experimental proposals aligned with their lines of work, facilitating connections with new audiences, professionals, and collectors.
Special Projects
Curated Programs
Curators
Lena Solá (Vòrtex)
Santiago Gasquet (Vòrtex)
Tenthaus (Polar & Tropic)
Bunga Siagian (Polar & Tropic)
JAF (Polar & Tropic)
The Special Projects constitute the central structure of each edition of Swab, giving voice to narratives, formats, and geographies that respond to the urgencies of the present. By combining exhibitions with public programming, these projects shape the discourse of the fair and the relationship between the proposals and their audiences.
From the Swab Foundation, the intention of the Special Projects is to explore how the art fair can be useful for emerging practices, fostering the development of infrastructures for collaboration, sustainability, and knowledge exchange.
The Special Projects of 2025 were: Polar and Tropic, SOLO, and Vórtex.
Polar and Tropic proposes an encounter between artistic collectives from seemingly opposing yet subtly connected geographical and cultural contexts—the Nordic region and Southeast Asia—whose practices are sustained through networks of collaboration and solidarity.
SOLO 2025 unfolds as a constellation of practices developed across six independent art spaces throughout Europe. Starting from the format of the solo exhibition, it explores the boundaries between the personal and the collective, the intimate and the shared, the material and the symbolic.
The Vórtex program presents a space for exchange between emerging projects from Barcelona and Latin America, with the aim of building bridges between two territories whose cultural landscapes have shaped one another, sharing a back-and-forth of resonances, influences, and reinventions.
