Setup Art Fair

ABOUT SETUP CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR

SetUp Contemporary Art Fair is a contemporary art fair which focuses its attention on emerging artists. Established in 2013, it is now celebrating its fifth edition. It takes place in Bologna during the art week.

Setup means: “preparing the operations for the next start of a system", and it indicates the fair’s intentions: ignite a new process to rethink the art system.

SetUp Contemporary Art Fair is the first and only fair designed to make interact the three key figures of the contemporary art establishment: artist – curator/critic – gallerist.
Its format asks exhibitors to present a curatorial project, with at least an under 35 artists combined with a critic text written by an under 35 curator.

Why? To provide new horizons, to promote galleries that invests on emerging artists, to grew a new generation of collectors, to generate a virtuous short circuit between trade and culture, to increase the public and most of all because we believe in the possibility of creating a healthy cultural economy. Over the past five editions SetUp has hosted over 190 galleries, 34 foreign galleries, giving space to more than 800 artists; the cultural program offered 111 talks and 33 performances allowing more than 48,000 visitors to get in touch with emerging talents.

SetUp Contemporary Art Fair is a project created and ideated by Simona Gavioli and Alice Zannoni.

SETUP CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR 2018

LOCATION

SetUp 2018 will take place at Palazzo Pallavicini, Via San Felice 24, in the heart of Bologna, just a short distance from Due Torri and Piazza Maggiore.

Palazzo Pallavicini was built on the tradition of the Bolognese Fifteenth century, and belonged to the Villa, Volta and Marsili Families; in 1557 it was acquired by the Isolani counts, who in 1680 renovated it in the senatorial architecture. The architects, Luigi Casali and Paolo Canali were entrusted with the task to built the monumental staircase and the hall with a lantern shape ceiling, the highest of the city together with the one in Ranuzzi Palace.

In 1700 the palace changed owner from Ferdinando Bolognetti Alamandini the marshal Gian Luca Pallavicini, captain and minister of the Empress Maria Teresa of Austria and Viceroy of Milan. With Pallavicini, the building become center of a European court, offering events such as banquets, concerts, and housing crowned heads.

In the halls Palazzo Pallavicini, chapters of international history were written and significant diplomatic relations have been written. Main politicians of that time came here: Maria Carolina of Hapsburg stopped in Bologna, the grand duke of Tuscany Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine with his wife Maria Luisa of Bourbon of Spain and the Austrian Emperor Giuseppe II too.
Giuseppe Pallavicini, the marshall’s son, became the owner of the palace therefore decided to change the palace in via San Felice in an avant-garde neoclassical shipyard of the highest level.

It is worth remembering that in march 26, 1770, the fourteen year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart performed in the presence of seventy ladies and of the European high aristocracy. Mozart family was hosted on several occasions and in autumn, he composed Quaerite primum regnum Dei and in all probability the minuet in E flat major k 94 were created.

THEME 

Every edition of SetUp Contemporary Art Fair  is guided by a leading theme.
The guiding theme of the sixth edition of SetUp Contemporary Art Fair is Expectation.

Expectation, as interpreted by Saint Augustine, is not a specific moment when time has to be filled, but it is time extended beyond time, creating the emotional and active base shaping the future.
Consistent with the aims of the fair, which from its outset has believed in tomorrow as a propelling force, SetUp 2018 exhibitors are asked to present a curatorial project in which the observation of the present becomes a study on expectation, to be understood as temporal and spatial projection in which something takes shape, defining economic, social, political, geographic, but also physical, technological, formal scenarios. Through expectation we will read the future through art.