ABOUT
UPCOMING
EDITIONS
FROM 6 TO 9
Shopping Centre
Xavier Aballí
Nov 15th - Jan 4th
The show gathers more than three hundred museum gift shop bags collected by Xavier Aballí over many years, now displayed as a vast installation that wallpapers the gallery’s walls.
With Shopping Centre, Aballí turns his attention to one of the most omnipresent spaces within the institutional ecosystem: the gift shop, the final threshold of the visitor’s experience, the point where contemplation gives way to consumption, and where the immaterial encounter with art is translated into an object one can hold, carry, and display. By isolating and accumulating these container objects, Aballí exposes the subtle intersections between institution and commerce, art and its circulation, memory and consumption.
Historically, museum gift shops emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when institutions began to sell reproductions, postcards, and catalogues as a way to extend their collections beyond their walls. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for instance, opened its first dedicated shop in 1908. Over time, these modest counters evolved into sophisticated commercial spaces, reflecting the museum’s changing role in the circulation of culture and capital.
In recent decades, this evolution has accelerated. What once functioned simply as an “exit through the gift shop” accessory has increasingly become a luxury retail destination. At the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, for example, the “Church & State” pop-up linked to Virgil Abloh’s Figures of Speech exhibition sold limited-edition jackets for hundreds of dollars. The contemporary museum shop now also works as a platform for branded collaborations, design-led merchandise, and limited-run objects that mirror the exclusivity of the luxury market.
This logic has seeped into art education itself. In July 2023, students from UAL’s Camberwell College of Arts presented their graduate exhibition accompanied by a fully functioning gift shop, where visitors could purchase souvenirs such as keychains featuring miniature reproductions of the exhibited paintings. Before these artworks ever entered the art market, they were already commodified, pre-emptively translated into products and critical distance collapsed into self-branding. By earnestly adopting the gift shop as a model, the action revealed how deeply the mechanisms of consumption have permeated artistic identity.
The museum gift shop has thus grown into a major site of both cultural dissemination and commercial branding. Its merchandise, mugs, magnets, pencils, tote bags, transforms artworks into tokens and museums into brands. Each bag, bearing the logo of an institution such as Tate, Centre Pompidou, or Museo Reina Sofía, becomes a mobile sign of cultural belonging. To carry one is to perform participation: a quiet declaration of having been there, of having absorbed a fragment of institutional aura.
This phenomenon echoes broader trends in consumer culture. As The Guardian observes, “even the humble paper shopping bag has ascended to the status of accessory.” Luxury-brand paper bags have become desirable fashion items, appearing as props in social media posts or repurposed for everyday use. On resale platforms, empty carrier bags from Chanel, Balmain, or Hermès sell for significant sums, valued not for their function, but for the aura of affiliation they confer. To possess the bag is to display proximity to the brand, regardless of what it once contained. As marketing scholar Isabelle Szmigin notes, such bags “have value because they imply connection”, transforming consumption into an act of self-representation. It no longer matters if the Prada paper bag holds a purchase or a packed lunch, the symbol itself is the commodity.
Aballí’s accumulation of these bags transforms this familiar residue of the museum visit into an object in itself. Stripped of contents and commercial purpose, the bags become images, logos detached from function, reduced to their symbolic charge. Their repetition saturates the space, transforming the gallery into a landscape of institutional identities, where the distinction between culture and branding collapses.
At once humorous and critical, Aballí’s installation invites reflection on the ways in which cultural experience is packaged, branded, and sold. Shopping Centre becomes a mirror of the contemporary museum’s double role: a space for contemplation and a site of consumption. In these fragile, colourful, and familiar bags we find both the seduction of logos and the ghost of the artworks they once promised to contain.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Aballí is releasing Bag, a special edition of 100 brown paper bags, each stamped with the Under the Spell logo, numbered, signed, and subtly altered: their bottom is cut off. Priced at just £5, all proceeds from sales directly support the future programming of the space.
Bag, stripped of its function yet authenticated through signature and edition number, embodies the paradox at the heart of Aballí’s project: an object rendered useless in practical terms gains value precisely through its symbolic and performative charge. The edition operates as both artwork and critique: a souvenir of an exhibition that reflects on souvenirs, a transaction that mirrors the economy it questions.