EXHIBITION “OUT OF SEASON” SHIFTS CHRISTMAS FROM AFFECTION TO INDUSTRY

Artist Juliana Galbetti uses a wholesale trade fair of the Christmas industry as a starting point to show how this ritual is manufactured months before it is lived

Christmas is generally associated with coziness, family, and affective memory. However, the new exhibition by visual artist Juliana Galbetti, curated by Catalina Bergues, proposes an unprecedented and anthropological perspective on the holiday. Titled Out of Season (Fora de Época), the show runs from December 13, 2025, to January 31, 2026, at OMA Galeria and takes as its starting point a visit to Celebra Show — one of the largest wholesale trade fairs of the Christmas industry in Latin America.

From this encounter, Galbetti traces the Christmas ritual at its moment of industrial and commercial conception, revealing the backstage where trees, lights, and ornaments are defined as merchandise months before they occupy homes and streets. The exhibition follows the moment when manufacturers, importers, suppliers, and designers determine the trends, materials, and visual languages that will shape the holiday’s aesthetic universe.

The exhibition — an investigative project that addresses the temporal gap between the object and the rite — was selected and made possible through the 6th OMA Curatorial Call. The research that originated the project began with conceptual exchanges between the artist and the curator in early 2025, culminating in the joint writing of the proposal submitted to the call.

The curator notes that “before becoming a ritual, Christmas is a project. It is a disputed trend, an architected desire, aesthetic consumption, a constructed atmosphere. It is matter awaiting to become a symbol.” “My interest shifted to this liminal zone, the backstage where it is conceived, where the magic is still a prototype,” explains Galbetti, whose research transforms the logistical universe of the holiday into poetic material.

Christmas Before It Exists

Out of Season investigates how Christmas is constructed as a contemporary liturgy, with affections articulated through merchandise, design, and controlled atmospheres. The artist observes how this structure is manufactured in a technical time that operates outside the symbolic calendar — what she calls “out of season.”

The exhibition follows the moment when artificial trees, lights, wrapping papers, and chromatic patterns are still in a state of preparation, before acquiring the emotional dimension of the celebration.

The show brings together works that explore three central axes in the construction of Christmas, belonging to the Espírito Natalino (Christmas Spirit) series, presenting them as systems of visual organization in a complex topography where the elements exist as potentiality. These axes include the lights (LED systems and structures that highlight control over luminous intensity and the choreographed repetition of blinking); the signs (ornaments, branches, and trees that reveal the visual grammar of Christmas symbols and how they are designed and combined); and the packaging (wrapping papers and graphic patterns that expose the logic of anticipating desire, emphasizing their role as mediators of affection).