3. Building a collaborative partnership

Our first meeting with the Korean curatorial team was challenging.  Language created a barrier in some ways.  Our collaborators had much better command of English than we had of Korean, and could make themselves clearly understood from our perspective.  Nevertheless there was a degree of reticence and lack of confidence that that hindered verbal communication to some degree.

Another challenge came in the form of business customs.  The Australian curatorial team weren’t entirely naïve to this.  We had all conducted business in Asia before and were familiar with the importance of demonstrating a heightened level of courtesy and a respect for seniority and organisational hierarchy.    

In the end it was probably a combination of factors that stifled the free flow of thought and communication among the curators on both sides of the table.  It was difficult to build genuine rapport, trust and understanding and we were very conscious that we didn’t have the luxury of slowly building that relationship of trust over time. 

Gertrude has a long history of building successful, highly collaborative exhibitions with Australian and international curators where both the curatorial vision and selection of exhibiting artists was realised as a result of shared insights, perspectives and discussion.  Our partner institution on the other hand, was accustomed to collaborating in a different way.  For them, the collaborative process involved honouring their partner institution by offering the most renowned Korean artists they could secure for the exhibition with the expectation that the international partner would reciprocate in a similar way.  It was a partnership but perhaps one that was realised as a result of the individual and independent efforts of both parties rather than a shared and integrated approach to building an exhibition.

We left that first meeting with serious doubts about our ability to successfully deliver an exhibition together.

For me, this experience illustrated some useful points:

• Successful artistic collaborations can’t be engineered.  They take time to evolve and need to be nurtured.  If you are trying to achieve this across geography you need to build sufficient time into your exhibition schedule to foster the relationship.
• Language can present a barrier to successful international partnerships and you need to invest time in finding ways to build mutual understanding using a variety of means.
• You need to be aware of differing business styles and customs and be willing to make adjustments in your own style accordingly
• Funding constraints can limit the capacity for arts practitioners to travel to meet together on a regular basis to build understanding and rapport.  Technology (eg skype) can help to bridge the distance but I don’t think it can replace the value of personal, face-to-face communication.