In the process of formulating the exhibition budget, I deeply felt the tension between ideal and reality. At the beginning of the curatorial process, the exhibition was envisaged to be rich in forms, including multimedia interactions, live performances and large-scale installations. However, after the actual breakdown of expenses, I found that most of the budget was already taken up by basic costs such as venue rental, technical support, transport and insurance. This forced me to re-examine the curatorial proposal and think about how to retain the core concept of the project with limited resources, without overly sacrificing artistic expression and ensuring the practicality of the exhibition.
On the other hand, the uncertainty of the prices of materials and services also brought a lot of challenges to the budgeting process. The wide range of prices offered by different suppliers, coupled with external economic factors such as inflation, caused the original estimated costs to rise. In order to deal with this, I set up a contingency in the budget to allow for flexible adjustments, and I also sought multiple quotations and locked in contracts as early as possible to minimise the risk of unexpected expenditure at a later stage.
The uncertainty of funding sources is also an important consideration. Although the plan was to apply for external funding such as Creative Scotland, the fund approval cycle was long and competitive, and the outcome was not controllable.
Finally, in the budget allocation, I pay special attention to the balance between artists’ remuneration and other costs of the exhibition. As a curator, I believe that the reasonable payment of artists’ labour is an indispensable part of exhibition ethics. However, under the pressure of high venue rental and production costs, the budget space left for artists’ remuneration is often easily compressed. In order to protect the rights of artists, I communicated with potential artists via email at an early stage of the planning process, asking for their royalty quotes, and eventually received responses of around £900 per artist. Accordingly, I estimated the artist fees at £1,000 per artist to cover possible additional expenses and set the overall artist expenditure at 3 x £1,000. At the same time, in order to enhance the overall resource return, I have also devised non-monetary methods of support, including exhibition tours and publication collaborations, to realise the curatorial principles of fairness and transparency as far as possible while keeping the budget under control.
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