Collaboration is the primary way to realise any screening or exhibition project. This section explores different ways you can work with other organisations or individuals and effective strategies to get the most out of these partnerships.

Sharing programmes

One of the main ways that venues, festivals or exhibition organisations can work together is to share programmes or a season. In order to find pre-existent programmes, explore events at festivals or international venues outside of your immediate vicinity. Most festivals and venues are happy to see work travel and appear in different locations, but will often require you to pay the costs involved. Keep an eye on other events and contact them early if you are interested in their programme. It is much cheaper to ship a programme of films from one location than to collect up an entire programme once materials have been returned.

Similarly keep an eye on other cinemas or venues similar to yours to see what they are showing. Sharing programmes can greatly reduce costs and help venues show a wider range of material. Microcinema international (www.microcinema.com) are a network of independent cinemas around the world. The network and website are specifically set up to allow information sharing and encourage programme sharing between venues.

Other programmes can come from existent tours or packages that most distributors prepare. Distributors are often asked to prepare programmes of their latest work and are often happy to do so or recommend an existent programme. Distributors are always happy to discuss your idea with you and recommend titles for you or another curator to select.

Commissioning a curator

When organising festivals or exhibitions you may not be able to individually curate each facet of the programme. Often the selection of work or curating programmes/exhibitions will be outsourced to independent curators who will assemble work for you. This is an excellent way to introduce other perspectives into your organisation.

The relationship with independent curators can be very open or quite guided. Often you would approach a curator with a brief or idea for them to explore and develop in dialogue with you or independently. Dependent on the time and resources availible you could either invite a curator to develope a programme based on their area of specialism or interest or alternativly invite them to research and explore a new area relevent to your project. Be sure to give an idea of the parameters of the project in the brief, both with regard to the time frame and scale of the potential exhibition or screening, but also the type of work you'd like them to look at and present. Depending on their current involvement in the area you'd like them to look at, curators will need a certain amount of time to research and develop a programme.

Another way to work with curated programmes is to have a call for submissions from curators with ideas for exhibitions or programmes. Keep an eye on other projects in the UK and internationally to find interesting and appropriate cuators or programmers to work with.

Present oher people's programmes

Another side of collaboration is to present a programme that has already been curated. This happens when organisations would take on a touring programme. Often they would be keen to have the curator or representative present to introduce the work but often it is not possible. Then you are in a position where you are presenting work you may not be familiar with that may be quite different to your usual programme.

If at all possible try to get an idea from the curator or organiser of the programme / exhibition of how they see it and situate it within a broader context. Also discuss with the curator who they perceive the audience to be and what type of people they see the work appealing to. This information should then be relayed to the marketing staff so they are aware of how to handle the project.

Finally, when showing work in collaboration with another organisation or individual, think about how it will relate to the other activity in the venue. It is important to create an identity for collaborations within your screening programme that relates to the context and adds something different to it as well. There are many facets of artists’ film and video and this range and diversity is one of the area's great advantages. Think about how you can develop this with your collaborator in the host venue to help define the identity of your programme. Talk to the collaborator about how they see this work within your venue and what its key characteristics are. The added characteristics of the collaborator help to bring something different to your organisation and you should explore what is the best way for this to work for both of you.