The campaign “We pay artists” has started in Iceland. It’s purpose is to improve the working conditions and status of artists. Experienced and educated visual artists do not get paid for their work, this has to change.
SÍM – The Association of Icelandic Artists, hopes that through this campaign, it will be able to make a significant impact on museum and gallery representatives, on other cultural institutions, the government, the public and on visual artists themselves.
The core of the campaign is an agreement for artists when participating in and contributing to an exhibition. The draft can be the basis for an agreement with all museums in Iceland and galleries financed by the public sector, in part or in whole.
The working group that we reported on in a previous news update (LINK) took the Swedish MU agreement into consideration, when preparing the draft agreement.
SÍM celebrates this milestone agreement, which galleries and artists may use. The galleries and exhibition halls SÍM worked with, carried out a cost analysis based on exhibitions of the current year and found that it would cost 100 million IKR (700.000 euro) a year to implement the agreement, making additional government financing necessary.
During the coming months it is crucial that artists stand together and fight for their interests.