Mariella Franzoni curates Tomorrows/Today | Experience, Attempt, Experiment...
Tomorrows/Today is a curated section providing a platform for emerging and underrepresented artists, acting as a forecast for future relevant practices and ideas. The Tomorrows/Today Cash Prize will be awarded by a panel of art professionals to the artist with the highest quality presentation.
Mariella Franzoni (Italia, 1985) is a Contemporary Art Advisor, Curator, Researcher and Art Market specialist based in Barcelona. She holds a PhD from the Pomeu Fabra University and, in the past 13 years, has operated in the field of contemporary art transversally, between academic research and professional practice, in collaboration with international art galleries, festivals, museums and art businesses.
She is currently Lead Art Advisor and Artists & Galleries Partnership Manager at The Art Büro, the first art advisory firm in Barcelona, where she is advising new art buyers and introducing them to the culture of art collecting, while fostering investment worthy contemporary art acquisitions for HWNI clientele and businesses. For The Art Büro, she has recently curated the private-sale exhibition ‘Mirror to the City’ (Barcelona, 2021), bringing together rare modern avant-garde masterpieces and emblematic artworks by living established and emerging artists from the Spanish art scene. Since 2014, she curates independent projects that engage with emerging art practices and critical thinking.
She has been a fellow PhD researcher at the Center of Humanities Research, UWC (Cape Town), and was a researcher, conference speaker and moderator at institutions and organizations such as the Macba Museum (Barcelona), the Pompidou Museum and the Kandinsky Library (Paris), the AAVF African Art In Venice Forum (Venice Biennale), the TRANSCuratorial academy, KfW Stiftung (Berlin), the CDAN, Art & Nature Center (Huesca), the JAG Joburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg) and Goodman Gallery (Cape Town, Johannesburg, London), amongst others.
She published her doctoral thesis in 2019 with the title ‘The Economy of the Curatorial and the Fields of the Contemporary Art World: Curatorial instances and the market of contemporary art in and from (South) Africa.’ Her dissertation analyzes the relationship between curating and the contemporary art market, inscribing such an enquiry in the realms of curatorial theory and art market studies, while delving into the curatorial making of contemporary African art since the end of the ‘80.
