Terms of Engagement with Make or Break

Terms of Engagement with Make or Break: an artist-led approach to working with museums, galleries, biennials, fairs, and festivals.

When artists work with institutions, complicated and unequal power dynamics often come into play. Typically, artists are given contracts that outline the presenting partner's terms and expectations. But what if artists were empowered to communicate their own values, needs, and requests? Could this lead to more equitable and positive working relationships?

Make or Break will guide you through their Terms of Engagement – an open-source document that outlines values, expectations, and desirable working conditions from an artist's perspective – and help you develop your own. It’s similar to a band’s rider, but instead of listing preferred snacks, you get to define your ethical non-negotiables.

Who is this session for:

This session is for practicing artists who work (or intend to) with galleries and other institutions (e.g. museums, festivals, biennales), and who want to enter into these relationships with more confidence and autonomy, and with tools for communicating your values and needs. The workshop facilitators are visual artists, but the session may also be useful for other kinds of creative practitioners.

Learning outcomes:

• Learn what a Terms of Engagement document is, and how it is useful for artists and other creative practitioners

• Define your own values, needs, and non-negotiables in relation to how you want to operate professionally

• Develop your own Terms of Engagement that you can use in developing positive professional relationships

About the artist:

Make or Break devise and experiment with process-based projects that are co-authored with communities we are invited into. These have included creating experimental economies and temporary currencies; caring for civic spaces and the ‘non-human’; celebrating the labour of strangers; prototyping for future worlds; writing speculative fiction and facilitating conversations as collective research.

Make or Break is Bec Gallo (they/them) and Connie Anthes (she/her), who work and live on the stolen lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people in Sydney, Australia.