Swab Barcelona celebrates its 18th edition with more than 150 artists from 22 countries

From 2 to 5 October, Swab Barcelona celebrates its 18th edition, bringing together more than 50 galleries, exhibition spaces and artistic projects from both national and international backgrounds in a reinvented event. The fair's emblematic headquarters was the Fira Barcelona's Italy Pavilion until, in 2003, it moved permanently to the neighbouring Palau de l'Art Tèxtil, one of the buildings built for the 1929 Universal Exhibition. With a surface area of 3,000 m², this space has become the ideal setting for the event's constant growth.

With its 18th edition, from 2 to 5 October, Swab Barcelona opens a new stage under the direction of Carolina Díez-Cascón and keeping alive the legacy of its founder, the architect and collector Joaquín Díez-Cascón. The event thus recovers the founding spirit of the initiative: to be a platform for discovering the most emerging art and to highlight the work of artists, curators and gallerists who, outside the usual circuits of artistic consumption, promote new paradigms of collaboration, self-management, production and representation.

• General Program, ADN_Joan Pallé, Coche en llamas (2018).

The 2025 edition will bring together more than 150 artists and 60 projects from 22 different countries, with a special focus on emerging scenes from Northern Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America. The fair is structured around several programs that define its curatorial profile. Among them, the General Program stands out, which groups together nearly half of the proposals and gives voice to galleries established in the field of contemporary art that, within the framework of SWAB, are committed to more experimental, risky projects closely linked to the emerging scene. Of the 60 proposals that make up the program, coming from 22 countries, about 15 have roots in Barcelona. The program focuses on fostering collaborative networks and includes both collective exhibitions and dialogue spaces.

One of the elements of Swab Barcelona will be international dialogues. One of the most relevant initiatives is that of the duets between six self-managed spaces from Barcelona and six from Latin America. An example is the collaboration between Afterpoema (Buenos Aires) and NOMEVOY (Barcelona), which present an altar-shaped installation full of symbolism and with a staging of great visual strength.

• General Program, weseeitems, Sopo Mamaladze.

Also artistic diversity. The program includes very varied proposals: from photographic projects that reflect on painful experiences (ADN Galeria), to works created with heterogeneous materials or innovative sensorial pieces, such as Suaveart's olfactory compositions made from the camphor tree. There is also no shortage of digital art, nor a pavilion built with recycled materials.

Throughout the four days, numerous activities will be held, including performances that fuse art and dance, as well as a space dedicated to children that offers an immersion in the traditional Japanese technique of woodblock printing.

The MyFAF program, promoted by the SWAB Barcelona Foundation, is consolidating itself as a platform dedicated to giving visibility and support to galleries with less than two years of experience that are participating in an international fair for the first time.

Each edition, through a grant, three spaces are chosen that present projects with a clear curatorial line and a close connection to the new dynamics of emerging contemporary art. In 2025, the selected spaces are Néboa (Lugo), Autokomanda (Belgrade) and Outhouse (London), which provide experimental and committed perspectives on the languages and challenges of the present.

• MyFAF, NEÌBOA, Andrea Davila Rubio, Sitting piece for 2 (2021).

Participation 2025

The galleries that will be part of the general program are: Escat Gallery (Barcelona), ADN Galeria (Barcelona), BETA Contemporary (Barcelona), ethall (Barcelona), PALMADOTZE (Barcelona), Siddiq Projects (Hamburg), ATM Galeria (Gijón), THA HOUSE (Madrid), Reiners Contemporary Art (Marbella), Silica (Cannes), Abbozzo Gallery (Toronto), Iseurrat Artroom (Seoul), a66 gallery (Mallorca), bgallery (Barcelona), À Topos (Marseille), Ingahee (Seoul), Sham Gallery (London), Sol (Nexø), SC Gallery (Bilbao), Le Labo (Genoa), items we see (Tbilisi), GE53 (Valencia), Dilalica (Barcelona) and Trastienda Machete (Mexico).

Polar and Tropic: creating collaborative networks and promoting community work

The central program of this edition is FOCUS: POLAR AND TROPIC, which proposes a meeting between independent spaces from northern Europe and Southeast Asia, with the aim of generating a transversal dialogue between very diverse cultural and geographical contexts.

• Polar & Tropic, ss space space, Hojan Silver Lining (2025).

The SOLO SHOW program connects spaces in Spain with initiatives from countries such as France and Poland, with the aim of establishing cooperation networks and promoting joint production projects within the European scene.

Finally, VORTEX presents six conversations between artists and galleries from Latin America and the local context, giving rise to duos that share the same exhibition space and that, from a relational perspective, explore new forms of artistic and symbolic exchange between both regions.