Events Swab Barcelona

Swab presents its Public Program

Arte por Excel… 30-09-2025

The Swab 2025 Public Program is conceived as a space for collective activation, where the audience is no longer a passive observer but becomes an active part of the artistic and discursive process. This edition is framed by Polar and Tropic, curated by Tenthaus, Bunga Siagian and Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF), and focuses on mediums that allow casual gathering, collective action and alternative modes of distribution. Through formats such as radio, round tables, workshops, posters, and performance, the program proposes open devices that invite encounters, knowledge exchange, and the creation of new forms of community among artists, audiences, and contexts.

From its rural village in Indonesia, JaF brings its experience in integrating art, community, and territory through cultural production structures such as radio stations, festivals, and residencies—translated here into an activation of public space. Bunga Siagian who has been riunning the Jatiwangi sinematek, will present a video project, while Tenthaus, envisions the program as an expanding curatorial form, where each gesture can spark multiple resonances, generate bonds, and open pathways toward future forms of collaboration.

Barcelona-based platform Club9 is invited to curate the performance program of the fair. Dedicated to the creation and support of performative practice, Club9 will curate a program aligned with the curatorial direction of Tenthaus and JaF. It aims to forge links between participating exhibitor projects and the local context surrounding the fair

Video Box
Curated by Bunga Siangian and Tenthaus

This year Swab’s Video Box is framed within Polar and Tropic, the main theme of the 18^th edition. The curatorial team formed by Tenthaus and Bunga Siagian have invited cooperative platforms Av-arkki (Helsinki) and Mes56 (Yogyakarta), which congregate a wide diversity of the video production of their respective contexts, opening the perception of video as a territory and an inscription device to construct each local cosmology.

Ruang Mes 56 will premiere at Swab Barcelona the 18^th edition of VIDEO BATTLE, a video compilation produced and independently distributed since 2004 in Yogyakarta. Without attempting to categorize video works, this compilation, which features eight videos from 2020 to 2025, somehow shows the medium’s potential to infiltrate communal space, allowing for various comments rooted in daily life.

AV-arkki will present a selection of Finnish media artworks, curated by Avreno Heikka, that explore the interconnections between nature, mythology, perception, and cultural memory. Since 1989, AV-arkki has been a pioneering non-profit organization dedicated to distributing Finnish media art to festivals, museums, and cultural institutions worldwide. Its extensive online archive offers access to over 2,000 works, making it an important resource for curators, researchers, and educators.

Swab Radio
by Station of Commons

SWAB RADIO by Station of Commons will serve as a forum for dialogue between the different spaces at the fair and as a joint sound project for participants in the Polar & Tropic program, who will contribute audio pieces and existing radio archives. The project will also bring together initiatives from the Lumbung ecosystem present at Swab 2025, such as Lumbung Press and Lumbung Indonesia.

Driven by Station of Commons (SoC) —a collaborative platform founded in 2020 by Grégoire Rousseau (Helsinki), Juan Gomez (Geneva), Minerva Juolahti, Alain Ryckelynck, Eddie Choo Wen Yi and Mathilde Palenius— SWAB RADIO builds on SoC’s research into the possibilities of reappropriating technology within public space. SoC advocates radical, alternative strategies to the neoliberal system in terms of digital and independent means of production, communication, and distribution, operating as a research platform that creates a space for thinking around digital commoning. Since its inception, it has collaborated with manifesta13, documenta fifteen, Miss Read art book fair and Afrikadaa, among others.

In collaboration with Radio Fabra – Fàbrica de Creació Fabra i Coats, the station incorporates a territorial pulse: its Fabra Magazine program will be broadcast live from the fair, and its archive will expand the sound grid. The magazine, a mouthpiece for the processes of the residents and the life of the Fàbrica de Creació, combines interviews and sound creations by Oriol Rosell.

Running continuosly, 24h per day, from the opening on October 2 to the closing on October 5, Swab Radio will become a space where artists, exhibitors, and the public are invited to participate, forming a sound community that intertwines voices and radio archives from Station of Commons, Lumbung Radio, Fabra i Coats: Fàbrica de Creació, Swab, and the local context.

Listen here:
stationofcommons.org
lumbungradio.org/

Swab9 - Performance
by CLUB9

Swab9 is a new section within the fair dedicated to contemporary performative arts, created in collaboration with CLUB9, an independent platform committed to fostering and promoting performative practices.

In this edition, the program will present six performances curated by CLUB9, selected from among the exhibitors of Swab 2025, which will activate the space throughout the fair, establishing a direct connection between body, action, and context, and fostering dialogue between ephemeral practices and the institutional frameworks of contemporary art.

The project will also feature a collective reflection talk, conceived as a space to debate the challenges and opportunities that the integration of performance poses within the gallery context and the art market, thus expanding the conversation beyond the live experience.

Performance schedule:

- A signal slows the body writes the code. Katya Savel. Ingahee

THURSDAY 02 OCT
6.30pm – 7.30pm

-Suelta los Caballos (a sound and water based performance). Hannah Archambault. OUTHOUSE

FRIDAY 03 OCT
8pm – 9pm

-Zone X. Evamaria Schaller. SUAVEART

SATURDAY 04 OCT
01pm – 2.30pm

-Latencia. Montse Aránega. ESCAT

SATURDAY 04 OCT
7pm – 8pm

-Drink my sour milk from your stripper heel. Alida Maria Lanzi y Anusha Jean Ramesh. 200cent.

SUNDAY 05 OCT
6.30pm – 7.30pm

Check the full schedule and information here

Posters
by Lumbung Press (Barcelona) and Oksasenkatu 11 (Helsinki)

Lumbung Press produces and presents at Swab Barcelona a poster project that brings together the different spaces participating in the Polar and Tropic program, as well as other invited projects, such as Kasi Graphic and Mes 56. The project stems from an initiative by the Finnish collective Oksasenkatu, who commission artists and researchers to design political posters and distribute them free of charge in their space, inviting the public to performatively hang the posters around the city. Similarly, at Swab, the posters will be available to take for free, with the same invitation to distribute their content.

Tenthaus has proposed the following premise as a point of departure for the artists’ contributions:

We believe art and creation are part of everyday life. Sustaining both life and the cultural infrastructures that support creativity takes labor, time, and care. When policies erase histories, devalue lives, dismiss care, and suppress imagination, we respond by reimagining. Through art, we take part in public conversations, shaping the worlds we want to live in. Art becomes a way to practice freedom, build solidarity, and remain present in the ongoing work of collective transformation. We invite you to send a poster and join this unfolding conversation.

Talks

Swab Talks 2025 presents itself as a conversation space from which to reflect on the changes impacting contemporary art and its multiple ways of organizing, relating, exhibiting, and sustaining itself. Given the current convergence of economic, social, political, and environmental challenges, traditional structures in the art world are being questioned by the rise of new models that are more flexible, collaborative, and sustainable, forms of organization that respond to the need to imagine other ways of doing, caring, and exchanging.

These practices, often hybrid and born from the necessity for transformation, open new questions about the role of art in our societies and the types of relationships it can activate: between agents, with territories, with audiences, or even with the market itself. What forms of collecting can address the present? How do institutions support artistic practices experimenting with new formats today? What happens when galleries become porous spaces, capable of adapting to changing rhythms, languages, and urgencies?

BEYOND THE MARKET: TOKYO / SEOUL

THURSDAY 02 OCT
5- 6 pm
Participants: Ingahee (Seoul), Iseurrat Artroom (Seoul), Matter (Tokyo)

SPACE AND ACTION: strategies of dialogue between performative practices and the gallery ecosystem

THURSDAY 02 OCT
8- 9 pm
Participants: Quico Peinado (Art Barcelona´s director), Pilar Cruz (curator), Manuel Exposito (collector) and more TBC

Cartographies of a New Collecting: Complicities, Networks, and Affections

FRIDAY 03 OCT
5 – 6 pm
Participants: Martí Manen (Director, Index Foundation, Stockholm), Bunga Siagian (Co-curator, Polar & Tropic, Jakarta), Belén Santillán (Co-curator Polar & Tropic, TentHaus, Oslo), Claudia Segura (Head of Collection at MACBA, BCN), Antonio Echeverría (Co-director of Il posto and collector-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, Chile) and Sigrún Davíðsdóttir (collector-in-residence at Delfina Foundation).

Soft Galleries – Projects Attuned to the Present

FRIDAY 03 OCT
6.15-7.15 pm
Participants: Anna Rovira (Palmadotze, Els Monjos), Jorge Bravo (EtHall, Hospitalet), Jordi Pérez (ADN, Barcelona), ATM, Gijón and Dilalica, Barcelona TBC

COLLABORATION AS FORM

SATURDAY 04 OCT
12.30-1.30 pm
Participants: Jade Meili (Curator, Paris/Bergen), Bunga Siagian (Curator, Jakarta), Sigrún Davíðsdóttir (Delfina Foundation Collector-in-residence, London) and Tenthaus (Oslo)

RHYTHMS OF EXCHANGE: VOICES BETWEEN LATIN AMERICA AND EUROPE

SATURDAY 04
5- 6pm
Participants: María Ibáñez (JULIO, Paris), Juan Pablo Piñero (Casa Espacio, Barcelona), Cheché Valdés (Beta Contemporary, Barcelona) and Karime Sierra (Proyectos Multi Propósito, Mexico/London).

TAIPEI AS A NODE OF INNOVATION

SUNDAY 05 OCT
12:30-1.30 pm
Participants: Yipey Lee (SUAVEART, Taipei), Sean Tseng (SS Space Space, Taipei), Shu‑Jung Chao (artist-in-residence at Hangar, Taipei).

(In)dependent SOLO

SUNDAY 05 OCT
5 – 6 pm
Participants: Oriol Aribau (Espai 19, Barcelona), Tractora Koop (Atoi, Bilbao), Michael Biber (C U AT SADKA, Kraków), Constanza Piaggio (JULIO, Paris), Barbara Fecchio (BAM PROJECTS), Joan Pallé (Malpaís, Barcelona).

Check the full schedule and information here

Workshops

As part of the public program of Polar and Tropic, a series of audience activations are proposed that position art as a tool for encounter, reflection, and collective transformation. This workshops explore how creative processes can open up shared spaces to imagine new models of relationship, resistance, and care. The emphasis of these activities lies in shared experience, collective gestures, and the potential of art to generate connections, meanings, and spaces of possibility both within and beyond the exhibition framework.

PABELIT by Gelanggang Olah Rasa