Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).
“52 Weeks” is a one year campaign starting in October 2013. Artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, a text, or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi.
50° Celsius, page layout from 2010 Supplement to the New Emirati Britannica, Third Edition
This week’s contribution to Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks is byLynn Love and Ann Sappenfield
The 2010 Supplement focuses on science, technology and natural history, and was commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE for the Tenth Sharjah Biennial, 2011.
To download, print, or simply see a higher resolution version of the work, please click here
Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).
“52 Weeks” is a one year campaign starting in October 2013. Artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, a text, or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi.
A triptych; multimedia components and a printable PDF
This week’s contribution to Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks is by Andrew Ross and MTL (Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain)
A high school graduate with an offer from a prestigious art institute dreams of artworld renown and takes out loans that will burden her for decades. Her brother is enrolled at NYU, national leader in student debt–the university is a growth machine, feeding off tuition and cheap credit to expand at home and overseas. In Bangladesh, the eldest son of a heavily indebted family dreams of Gulf riches, and borrows money to pay his recruitment and transit fees for passage to the UAE. There, on the “Island of Happiness,” Abu Dhabi’s showpiece real estate venture, his bonded labor is now linked to the “indenture” of the American students. Their respective financial obligations are connected to, and amplified by, Abu Dhabi’s over-leveraged boom economy, which rests on an ever-growing carbon debt. No Debt Is An Island traces the chain of debt that sustains the fortunes of the international art market, the global aspirations of Anglophone higher education, and the ascent of the Gulf petroleum states.
BREAK THE CHAINS
Make the links
Follow the money
Do the research
Walk the talk
Pressure the brands
Raise the bar
Break the chain
(and keep the oil in the soil)
Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).
“52 Weeks” is a one year campaign starting in October 2013. Artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, a text, or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi.
Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).
“52 Weeks” is a one year campaign starting in October 2013. Artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, a text, or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi.
Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).”52 Weeks” is a one year campaign starting in October 2013. Artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, a text, or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi.
This week’s contribution to Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks is by Matt Greco & Greg Sholette
To view more images and a video from this week’s contribution please click on the links via “images” and “video”
Repayment of recruitment fees by foreign workers on Saadiyat Island often takes months or years and is “the single greatest factor in creating conditions of forced labor.” – Human Rights Watch Report
Despite being one of the wealthiest nations in the world Abu Dhabi has yet to agree on measures to assure fair labor conditions even as they seek to legitimize their cultural endeavors by purchasing the choicest of Western brands: The Guggenheim, Louvre, New York University. The Workers Quarters Collectable was “shop-dropped” at the Guggenheim Museum gift shop in New York as part of a larger campaign by Gulf Labor Coalition called “52 Weeks.”
Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).
“52 Weeks” is a one year campaign starting in October 2013. Artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, a text, or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi.
Derived from presentations given at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Exeter, UK, and the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo, Norway, during Fall 2013. (Thanks K.)
This week’s contribution to Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks is by Guy Mannes-Abbott
To download, print, or simply see a higher resolution version of the poster, please click here
In his famous text ‘Beyond Human Rights’ (1993), Giorgio Agamben described the 20th century refugee as the paradigmatic “figure for the people of our time”. I would suggest that the migrant worker is the 21st century equivalent of this configuration of the refugee. “Only in a world in which … the citizen has been able to recognize the refugee that he or she is … is the political survival of humankind today thinkable.”
Meanwhile, on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, even government-appointed monitors reported that “75% of [migrant] workers interviewed paid recruitment fees and 77% had paid visa and travel costs (:) the most significant factor in creating conditions of forced labor in the UAE” (HRW quoting PwC, September 2012). Approximately 80% of the UAE’s population is migrant, with no prospects of permanent residence.
On Saadiyat, Rafael Vinoly’s NYU campus has been built, and Jean Nouvel’s Louvre AD is being built, by that “forced labor”. The foundations of Norman Foster’s Zayed National Museum and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim AD have been laid by the same means. Before further memorialising a dishonorable legacy (contracts to build-out the latter schemes are expected spring 2014), they have time, occasion and opportunity to change course.
Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).
“52 Weeks” is a one year campaign starting in October 2013. Artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, a text, or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi.
Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).
“52 Weeks” is a one year campaign starting in October 2013. Artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, a text, or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi.
Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).
“52 Weeks” is a one year campaign starting in October 2013. Artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, a text, or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi.
Michael Ruiz, San Diego, “la línea” “the line” erased digital image on paper, 2012-13
This week’s contributions are by Doris Bittar and Jayce Salloum:
Doris Bittar/Protea Gallery in San Diego is calling for art work, texts, photographs, paintings, sketches from artists that are responsive to the struggles of migrant labor worldwide.
– The art-text-sketches should be no bigger than 8″x10″ (20.3 cm x 25.4 cm) and resolution of about 1MB.
– There are no restrictions on the type of art, and its parameters are broad. It could be a self-portrait, a poem, a sketch for an installation, a script, a text piece, a collage, a drawing, a photograph…
– Your piece will be part of a growing album on our Facebook page. Your name, the city you reside in, the title, media and date of the piece(s) and its copyright status will be included in the caption.
I remember installing an exhibition in the UAE. The workers transformed this massive hanger like conference hall into separate galleries for each artist. For lunch break the workers would lay down the drywall/gypsum board onto the ground and sleep for a bit, curled up on top of it after eating from their tiffins. In the evenings outside their living quarters thousands of men milled about, shopping and socializing, absent were women and children, their families not able to accompany them. It was as if two-thirds of the demographic had suddenly disappeared.
Full labour and human rights should be protected in all contracts in the UAE and worldwide. Capital exploits labour, it needs to be watched and acted against. My current exhibition, location/dis-locations(s): contingent promises at grunt gallery in Vancouver, Canada is dedicated to52 Weeks of Gulf Labor. It is a sort of a ballad to humans’ actions and their needs to create, joys found, and the inevitable destruction wrought. Someday we may learn to learn, someday we may remember to remember and act accordingly, let’s hope sooner rather than later.
Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).
“52 Weeks” is a one year campaign starting in October 2013. Artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, a text, or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi.
