Ramaya Tegegne
Picking up on Andrea Fraser & Helmut Draxler’s Services, which addressed questions of labor in the art field, Ramaya Tegegne invited Stephan Dillemuth, one of the participants of the working-group meetings inaugurating the 1994 project, to take part in a public discussion about current perspectives departing from this event. This conversation took place on November 10th, 2017 in the framework of the exhibition Szenen über Services und Kapitalien by the two artists at Up State in Zurich, as well as the initiative Wages for Wages Against carrying forward the debate on fees in return for artistic services within Switzerland.
This publication presents the transcript of a discussion between the eleven artists invited to participate in a group exhibition at Fri Art Kunsthalle Fribourg in October 2018. This discussion was organized by Ramaya Tegegne the day before the opening. The participants share experiences and recommendations regarding working conditions and, in particular, the question of the valorization of artistic labor.
The discussion gathered Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Jason Hirata, Ghislaine Leung, Jason Loebs, Cassidy Toner, Anaïs Wenger, Constantina Zavitsanos and Ramaya Tegegne. The title is borrowed from the American writer, civil rights activist, and self-described ...
Wages For Wages Against is a campaign for the fair remuneration of artists in Switzerland, better work conditions, and an alternative economy of the arts. Most art organizations—private, public, for profit or non-profit—in Switzerland do not systematically or sufficiently remunerate artists who take part in their programs, and do not make contracts to clarify labour relations. The goal of the campaign is to minimize precarity, financial inequalities and asymmetries within the arts. Wages For Wages Against wishes to open the field to individuals who cannot afford to work for free, and to allow non-commercial practices to flourish.
This booklet was released at the launch of the campaign Wages For Wages Against on March 2017 during the exhibition Speak, Lokal at Kunsthalle Zürich. It attempts to answer a simple question: why are artists not paid when they provide a service to an institution, in the form of an exhibition or else?
It gathers a series of interviews with Harry Burke (artist & Curator at Artists Space, NY), Bathazar Lovay (artist & Director of Fri Art Fribourg), Bea Schlingelhoff (artist & Head of BFA at ZHdK, Zürich), Lise Soskolne (artist & Organizer of W.A.G.E., New York) and Judith Welter (Director ...
Wages For Wages Against launches the first volume of a series of publications. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world and to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the making visible of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It gathers commissioned texts and republishes excerpts from reference texts, the latter only available in the printed version.
