iA


Commissioning

Alongside developing our own discrete projects, and supporting practitioners in their own research and development, Satellite Art Projects works regularly with private, government and cultural clients in the commissioning of contemporary art projects, across artforms – including recent sculpture, sound, interactive, performance and video projects for instance.

We have experience curating and managing the process of commissioning works, including the art strategy, artist brief, selection, design-development, detail-design, fabrication, installation, ongoing maintenance planning, and even deaccessioning processes involved with major works.

We find that our approach produces results, in particular new work that clients are excited by, and that artists are deeply proud of.

  • We are collaborative in the process of commissioning, and closely involved throughout.
  • Our method involves rigorous contemplation of the site, context and place of the commission, and the extrapolation of the potential contained within these.
  • We identify talented, savvy, committed and engaged artists to fit these opportunities with the expertise and insight to take the project to another level.
  • We advocate widely against working at arms length, preferring open dialogue and the refinement of ideas together (artists-curator-client) to receiving proposals from ‘the vacuum’. (Most tendering and selection processes work this arms-length way, and most result in pretty awful and forgettable work – not a coincidence.)
  • We are deeply committed to this area of artistic practice, and it matters greatly to us what is produced and supported when our name is attached. There is no room for laziness when the potential and legacy of an art commission is balanced so finely.

There are examples of some of the projects we have realised, or are in the latter stages of working on, on this website, and are always happy to discuss with potential clients how we might work together.