MYFAF (My First Art Fair) is a non-profit program promoted by the Swab Barcelona Foundation that continues to play a key role as a platform for supporting and promoting recently established galleries. The program offers three free booths to galleries that have been operating for less than two years and have never previously participated in an international art fair, providing them with their first access to this professional context.
This program is conceived as a space for learning, visibility, and integration into the international art ecosystem, enabling participating galleries to present projects of high cultural value without the economic pressures typically associated with the art fair circuit. This condition encourages the exploration of more ambitious and coherent curatorial approaches aligned with each gallery’s vision, while also facilitating connections with new audiences, professionals, and collectors. In this sense, the program points towards the possibility of a paradigm shift in relation to consumption, globalization, and the new challenges currently facing the art sector.
MYFAF can therefore be understood as an invitation to question established norms and to start from scratch. It evokes that first impulse—almost foundational—that every artist or gallery experiences when embarking on their very first art fair.
Taken as a whole, this program reaffirms Swab’s ongoing commitment to supporting emerging practices and fostering new forms of exchange between artists, art professionals, and audiences. Rather than operating as isolated structures, the fair’s different programs are conceived as a network of interconnected spaces where diverse methodologies and approaches can coexist, intersect, and activate new forms of artistic production, circulation, and experience.
The following spaces have been confirmed for this year’s edition:
DivergenX, Geneva, Switzerland
Twilight Contemporary, London, UK
Ulstrup Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark
In this way, Swab Radio is presented as a community channel to discuss contemporary art, articulate collective sonic imaginaries and global networks, bringing together artistic agents, exhibitors, and audiences in an ongoing conversation.
DivergenX, Geneva, Switzerland
Is a nomadic curatorial program intended to develop into a permanent space in Geneva (Switzerland) in the medium term. It operates as a platform that represents and supports artists considered “divergent.” It positions itself between an emerging gallery, an independent space, and a cultural-activist café. The aim is to show works that evoke a clear or suggestive rupture between the artists and a capitalist, patriarchal, ableist, and destructive system. Representing two artists; Anja Ripoll and Jeanne Tara.
Independent art spaces from Poland, the United Kingdom, and Spain open their doors to reveal the hidden worlds where experimentation, performance, and emerging voices thrive.
The founders of Galeria Szczur (Poznań), Outhouse Gallery (London), and See You at Satka (Kraków) share unconventional spaces—from basements and former wooden houses to a former public bath—transformed into vibrant laboratories for exhibitions, collaborations, and innovative new media projects. These artist-led initiatives challenge traditional notions of creating, connecting, and supporting talent beyond borders.
Twilight Contemporary, London, UK
Image courtesy of William Reinsch & Kitty McKay Presents a duo exhibition exploring world building as an act of resistance featuring the work of Kitty McKay and William Reinsch. McKay’s reimagined and manipulated urban reconstructions draw attention to the exclusionary structures embedded within public space. While Reinsch’s imagined rural landscapes form part of a wider world building exercise, allowing him to process and communicate experiences not easily put into words. Butted together, these urban and rural reimaginings stage a sinister cognitive dissonance between these two modes of world building. They ask the audience to re-evaluate normative perspectives on disability and mental health. These emerging practices open up new conversations about how art is organized, exhibited, and supported, as well as the kinds of relationships that can be established between artists, institutions, audiences, and the market. Through roundtable discussions accompanied by curatorial tours of the fair, Swab Talks creates a platform where these evolving ideas and practices can be explored collectively and connected with projects that actively experiment with new ways of making and sharing art. We present two of the talks from Swab Talks 2025, part of the Polar & Tropic program. These sessions are part of a broader series of conversations that took place during the fair. In total, the program included seven meetings, addressing the evolving practices and structures that shape contemporary art. |
Ulstrup Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark
Abel Kabel, Untitled, Clay, fired and glazed, 2025, larger sculpture 12 x 14 x 14 cm, smaller sculpture 9 x 10 x 10 cm. Presents a solo exhibition by Danish artist Abel Kabel (b. 2000), who, despite his young age, has quickly established himself as one of the most compelling emerging voices in the Danish contemporary art scene. His playful and experimental practice combines distinctive paintings with deliberately crude sculptures. Drawing inspiration from the everyday urban experiences of young adults, Kabel’s work addresses themes of transformation, resilience, identity, and nostalgia with honesty, energy, and without prejudice. Rooted in online imagery and the rawness of daily life, his practice explores the notion of “the web” as both a visual motif and a conceptual space, reflecting on interconnectedness, escapism, and digital influence. In doing so, he constructs an atmospheric universe that resonates with a generation shaped simultaneously by physical and digital realities. |
Although they emerge from different languages and geographies, the three galleries that make up this edition of MYFAF share a common impulse: to question the norms governing social and subjective experience, whether through the body, territory, or digital identity. DivergenX does so by positioning itself openly against established power structures; Twilight Contemporary through the construction of alternative worlds rooted in narratives around disability and mental health; and Ulstrup Gallery by exploring how digital life reshapes identity and nostalgia.
In all three cases, art is conceived as a space of resistance and reinvention, capable of proposing other ways of inhabiting—physical, social, or digital—a globalized world that imposes limits and social barriers. MYFAF thus brings together three emerging perspectives that, through divergence, dissonance, and the rawness of everyday life, experiment with new ways of imagining what is to come.
In collaboration with
