Gendai CBA: Collective Bargaining Agency
An online, crowd-sourced database of contracts commonly encountered by contemporary art practitioners.
The database informally and anonymously utilizes collective bargaining power to encourage sector transparency
and demand more equitable standards for labour conditions in the arts.
About Gendai
Gendai (Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng) is an art collective based in Tkaronto/Toronto dedicated to racialized artists as the next generation of cultural leaders, radical thinkers, and visionaries.
Throughout its twenty-year history, Gendai has supported experimental curatorial and organizational practices, whilst creating space for East Asian artists and artists of colour. As Gendai’s newest stewards, Marsya and Petrina are investing in the future of racialized arts leadership through collective research and practice. They began with Gendai MA MBA: Mastering the Art of Misguided Business Administration: a year-long capacity-development & network-building think tank between majority-BIPOC art collectives to critique and re-imagine institutional practices by centering values of collectivity, equity, and access. This developed into Gendai CO-OP: a series of private interviews on toxic labour conditions especially experienced by BIPOC arts workers at museums and art galleries. MA MBA and CO-OP members and our network of collaborators continue to meet to share stories and solicit advice from each other through Guidance Council, a series of via a bi-monthly casual drop-in for BIPOC-majority collectives, artists, and artsworkers. Using gossip as a methodology to trace the contours of institutional power, they build 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 “off-ramps” from the linear expressway of traditional, capitalist, and institutional career progression in the arts.
Petrina and Marsya are informed by their roles and responsibilities as racialized settlers and uninvited guests working and learning on Tkaronto (Toronto), which is on the treaty lands and territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, and the traditional territories of the Wendat, the Haudenosaunee, the Chippewa, and the Anishinabeg First Nations.