COLLECTIVE
COLLECTIVE
2023-ongoing
A collaboration between BAM, Durable Good, Gendai, Guidance Council, MICE, Rice Water, Whippersnapper, and Younger than Beyonce.
COLLECTIVE
2023-ongoing
A collaboration between BAM, Durable Good, Gendai, Guidance Council, MICE, Rice Water, Whippersnapper, and Younger than Beyonce.
Collective Collective is a project between eight visual arts collectives with majority-racialized members in Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada) as a response to the systemic racism and exploitative labour conditions in the arts, as well as the interrelated lack of sustainability within the sector.
We came together as part of a program initiated by Gendai in 2019, MA MBA: Mastering the Art of Misguided Business Administration – a series of co-learning sessions by and for DIY arts collectives with majority-racialized members to reimagine the way colonial, neoliberal, ableist, white dominant cultural organizations are structured and operated. Since then, we have been working as an artist supercollective that reorients the now-institutionalized movement of institutional critique out of the institutional framework and into collective and social practice. We believe our commitment to long-term relationship building and our drive to test and implement new ways of working together will result in a more equitable ecosystem within the arts and beyond.
✨We test out collaborative organizational and curatorial practices that center values of collectivity, solidarity, and mutual aid through resource and labour sharing.
✨ Our work is grounded on research with collectives and movement organizing work to learn not only about how we can dismantle or divest from our colonial institutions, but about living and being together.
✨ We build relationships with arts practitioners of colour to learn about sectoral labour conditions through feminist methodologies of listening and sharing stories.
✨ Following the idea of education as a liberatory practice, we make space for emergent conversations, citing the pedagogical methods developed by Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Pablo Helguera, adrienne maree brown, and others.
✨ We invite those who share our desire to practice more equitable alternatives to collaborate in our exhibitions, programs, and residencies.
Collective Collective is a study and a proposition for models of organizational governance that centers collaborative, non-hierarchical ways of working. It is a dream, a rehearsal for a post-apocalypse, a re-embodiment of all the ways resistance has and continues to happen.
We came together as part of a program initiated by Gendai in 2019, MA MBA: Mastering the Art of Misguided Business Administration – a series of co-learning sessions by and for DIY arts collectives with majority-racialized members to reimagine the way colonial, neoliberal, ableist, white dominant cultural organizations are structured and operated. Since then, we have been working as an artist supercollective that reorients the now-institutionalized movement of institutional critique out of the institutional framework and into collective and social practice. We believe our commitment to long-term relationship building and our drive to test and implement new ways of working together will result in a more equitable ecosystem within the arts and beyond.
✨We test out collaborative organizational and curatorial practices that center values of collectivity, solidarity, and mutual aid through resource and labour sharing.
✨ Our work is grounded on research with collectives and movement organizing work to learn not only about how we can dismantle or divest from our colonial institutions, but about living and being together.
✨ We build relationships with arts practitioners of colour to learn about sectoral labour conditions through feminist methodologies of listening and sharing stories.
✨ Following the idea of education as a liberatory practice, we make space for emergent conversations, citing the pedagogical methods developed by Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Pablo Helguera, adrienne maree brown, and others.
✨ We invite those who share our desire to practice more equitable alternatives to collaborate in our exhibitions, programs, and residencies.
Collective Collective is a study and a proposition for models of organizational governance that centers collaborative, non-hierarchical ways of working. It is a dream, a rehearsal for a post-apocalypse, a re-embodiment of all the ways resistance has and continues to happen.
Members of Collective Collective. Top left: Peter Rahul, Jenna Robar, Hanen Nanaa, Alexandra Hong, Geneviève Wallen. Bottom left: Marjan Verstappen, Marina Fathalla, raven lam, Ornette, Marsya Maharani, Aira, Petrina Ng. Missing: Lan “Florence” Yee.