Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng are participating in Together in Labour as their collective Gendai, and as members of Collective Collective, a network of racialized collectives in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada.
GENDAI
Gendai is an anti-racist collectively-run organization dedicated to building a more equitable art sector through collective research with BIPOC artists and arts workers. Using gossip as a methodology to trace the contours of institutional power, Gendai builds relationships with emerging and mid-career arts practitioners of colour to learn about current workplace dynamics in the sector. By offering peer mentorship and access to Gendai’s platform, resources, and network, they invite collaborators to support each other in pursuing non-institutional futures and imagine exits from the linear expressway of traditional, capitalist, and institutional career progression in the arts. Gendai has published their research in the Gossip issue of C Magazine, titled “We Should Talk: Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts."
As its current stewards, Maharani and Ng build on Gendai’s twenty-five-year history in supporting experimental curatorial and organizational practices, whilst creating space for East Asian artists and artists of colour.
COLLECTIVE COLLECTIVE
Collective Collective is a project between eight visual arts collectives with majority-racialized members 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.
Inspired by Gudskul Ecosystem (Jakarta, Indonesia), Collective Collective came together as part of a program initiated by Gendai in 2019, titled MA MBA: Mastering the Art of Misguided Business Administration. This was 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, Petrina & Marsya have been working together to reorient the now-institutionalized movement of institutional critique out of the institutional framework and into collective and social practice.
(1) 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. Not pictured: Lan “Florence” Yee.
(2) Credit: GED: Guerilla Equity Development at Workman Arts. Photo by Tai Nguyen.
(3) Logo of Collective Collective
