30 July @ 18:00 – 23 August @ 18:00
Dates: 31 July – 23 August
Public opening event: Thursday 30 July, 6-9pm
Gallery hours: Thursday – Friday, 1-7pm
Admission: Free
SET 91 presents Holding Company, the second exhibition of our second six-month curated programme. Bringing together new or unseen works and performances by H M Baker, José García Oliva, Luke Gould, Markéta Slaná, Maya King-Dabbs, Samra Mayanja, and Tawfik Naas, the show probes the holding company as a fundamentally intangible corporate structure.
About the exhibition
Holding Company is a group exhibition spanning object-based and event-based practices. Beginning from the place of neoliberal financial capitalism, the exhibition considers the affordances of ‘passive’ or ‘umbrella’ legal entities in the arts. While holding companies—corporate structures set up purely to hold assets and shield liability rather than produce goods—are everywhere in the contemporary art world, this show looks to the structure itself as a productive conceptual anchor.
Embracing rather than resisting the cultural rise of ‘corpcore’, the exhibition approaches this specific form of company on its own terms. If the gallery model is a kind of traditional company structure, perhaps the future of the gallery is holding companies all the way down: uber-streamlined, with staff and physical space abstracted out of the equation, and risk neatly packaged.
Alongside the exhibition, ‘Holding Company’ features a public programme of three scheduled meetings, collectively titled ‘Out of Office (OOO)’, with talks between Aram Masharqa, Tawfik Naas, José García Oliva, and Samra Mayanja.
Additional viewings on the weekend are available by appointment. For more information and to book an appointment, please contact: aram@masharqa.com
About SET 91
SET 91 is SET’s first in-house curated contemporary arts gallery, located in Old Street. Dedicated to supporting early-career contemporary artists, the gallery provides a non-profit platform for experimentation, collaboration, and the presentation of new work beyond commercial pressures.