Before the first collaborative exhibition I took part in last year, I was really apprehensive about working with people I had never worked with before. Working together often requires compromise, which can feel like a removal of the autonomy one is used to when creating work. Art is subjective and personal, making it likely that someone at some point will see something of yours as being "wrong," and it can feel equally "wrong" for you to "correct" it based on their view. However, while I had never worked with these people before and while I had no idea how they thought or worked, I found that since I trusted them to be intelligent, insightful and creative, taking leaps of faith became easy and compromise was not a problem. I was happy to create something entirely collaborative and find out where putting our ideas together would take us.
I signed up to this workshop perfectly happy to do the same thing: pool ideas and temporarily forget individuality. However, there was a group who felt strongly about balancing collaboration and individuality. Having changed my views on the importance of individuality within a group exhibition, I was curious to see if my views could be changed back, and I joined them.
We acknowledged the fact that the group was not formed organically; it was formed as a result of the instruction to get into groups and create an exhibition, rather than a desire to collaborate with a certain set of people based on knowing them and knowing about their work. This felt honest; acknowledging the "flaw" made it no longer a "flaw," and it became an interesting quirk to work with and to inform and inspire our work.
Having put together the exhibition (using fresh work) in a relatively short space of time is something that I feel naturally made it self-referential in a way. When you have limited discussion time, it seems normal for most of the talking to be about the fact that you are having an exhibition, and so the exhibition starts to be about itself. This was a collaborative exhibition about collaboration. This is something else that I feel was honest about it - we did not force a specific theme.
Overall, I'm glad I took part in this. I worked with insightful, interesting and dynamic people, and had an experience embracing individuality within a collaboration.
