52weeks

Week 9 . Farid Sarroukh and Maha Traboulsi in collaboration with Walid Raad . If FIFA did…

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Talkingtopressagainsadly

If FIFA did…, poster, 2013 

This week’s contribution to Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks is by Farid Sarroukh and Maha Traboulsi in collaboration with Walid Raad
 
To download, print, or simply see a higher resolution version of the poster, please click here
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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.

To learn more visit: www.gulflabour.org

Please read and/or sign our petition

For additional information, please email: contact@gulflabour.org

52weeks

Week 8 . Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker (Cinema Suitcase) . Refuse Complicity

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Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker, poster, 2013

This week’s contribution to Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks is by Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker (Cinema Suitcase)
Click on the links to download the poster or view a related video
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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.

To learn more visit: www.gulflabour.org
Please read and/or sign our petition
For additional information, please email: contact@gulflabour.org

52weeks

Week 7 . Matt Greco & Greg Sholette . Saadiyat Island Workers Quarters Collectable, 2013

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Matt Greco & Greg Sholette
Solomon R Guggenheim

Saadiyat Island Workers Quarters Collectable, 2013
“Shop-Dropped” 3-D Prints, printed label, plastic boxes: unlimited edition.

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.”
Photo Credits: Karin Cintron
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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.

To learn more visit: www.gulflabour.org

For additional information, please email: contact@gulflabour.org

52weeks

Week 6 . Guy Mannes-Abbott . me, we, the, be/coming migrant

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Guy 001

Guy Mannes-Abbott, poster, 2013 

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.

—Guy Mannes-Abbott

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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.

To learn more visit: www.gulflabour.org

For additional information, please email: contact@gulflabour.org

52weeks

Week 5 . Hans Haacke . “I paid …”

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Hans Haacke, poster, 2013
This week’s contribution to Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks is by Hans Haacke
To download, print, or simply see a higher resolution version of the poster, 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.
52weeks

Week 4 . Sam Durant . Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Labor Camp for Guest Workers

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Sam Durant, poster, 2013

This week’s contribution to Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks is by the artist Sam Durant.
To download, print, or simply see a higher resolution version of the poster, 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.

To learn more visit: www.gulflabour.org
For additional information, please email: contact@gulflabour.org

52weeks

Week 3 . West Coast Artists in Vancouver, San Diego and Tijuana Launch Campaigns for Gulf Labor

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 Ruiz Border 2

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.

– Send images to Doris Bittar (Protea Gallery): doris.bittar@gmail.com Phone: 619 787-8505

Jayce 

Jayce Salloum, location/dis-location(s): contingent promises (installation excerpt), 2012

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 to 52 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.

–Jayce Salloum

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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.

To learn more visit: www.gulflabour.org

For additional information, please email: contact@gulflabour.org

52weeks, Actions, News

Week 2 . Thomas Hirschhorn. My Guggenheim Dilemma

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Gulf Labor

52 Weeks

 image
Banners, 2009
Photocopies and tape, 66.7 x 53.7 cm 
Made at the occasion of the exhibition: Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum Rotunda, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2010
Courtesy: the artist
This week’s contribution to Gulf Labor’s 52 Week Campaign is by Thomas Hirschhorn:
 

Dear Nancy, Dear Richard,
As you know, I am one of those who signed the petition for the boycott of the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, to put pressure on the museum to do everything it can in order to remedy the labor exploitation on Saadiyat Island, to treat the workers as they deserve to be treated, and to protect their rights as workers. I am happy and willing to do everything I can do in order to achieve this; that’s why I signed the petition for a boycott.

Nevertheless, there is a dilemma. The dilemma – my dilemma – is not about exhibiting, here and now, my work “Cavemanman” in the Guggenheim Bilbao, while at the same time boycotting the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. That is not my dilemma, and the dilemma is not about some other contradiction observers might point out either.

The dilemma, my dilemma, the real dilemma, is the contradiction between the politics of “good intentions”, “the good conscience”, “the engagement of the artist” – that I should in fact call “pseudo-politics” or “making politics”, for it implies narcissism and selfishness, but which I signed the letter for – and my belief and conviction that Art, as Art, has to keep completely out of any daily political cause in order to maintain its power, its artistic power, its real political power.

By signing the petition for this boycott, I am facing this dilemma, my dilemma. It’s a problem without a solution; it’s a dead-end. On the one side, I really want to do what I can, what I think is in my power, to fight for equality, universality, and justice. But I also know that it is easy to add my signature to this fancy artists’ boycott. Too easy, because I know that when signing a boycott, I have to pay the price for the boycott – myself first – so that the outcome can be a real success.

Art – because it’s art – resists a simplified idealism and a simplified realism, because it refuses aesthetic and political idealism and aesthetic and political realism. And Art -because it’s Art -is never neutral, but Art cannot be neutralized by doing politics. I want to admit that this is the “dead-end” I am in. I have to face it. I have to confront this dilemma and furthermore – as an artist – I even have to assert it as my dilemma.

My hope is that something that makes sense remains.
– My signature for the boycott will make sense if it does change the conditions of the workers for Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
– My signature for the boycott will make sense if the dilemma, the trap, and the temptation of politics allows me to confront the hard core of reality, which is the limit of such a boycott.
– And my signature for the boycott of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will make sense if I have to pay a price for it.
Thank you,
Thomas Hirschhorn, April, 2011

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.

To learn more visit:
www.gulflabour.org

For additional information, please email:
contact@gulflabour.org

52weeks, Actions

GULF LABOR LAUNCHES 52 WEEKS OF GULF LABOR

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
GULF LABOR LAUNCHES 52 WEEKS OF GULF LABOR
New York, October 17, 2013

What is 52 Weeks?

“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 coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi who are building the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).

Contributions during the first 13 weeks by: Doug Ashford, Doris Bittar, Sam Durant, Matthew Greco, Gulf Labor, Hans Haacke, Thomas Hirschhorn, Lynn Love, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Naeem Mohaiemen, Walid Raad, Oliver Ressler, Andrew Ross, Jayce Salloum, Ann Sappenfield, Gregory Sholette.

Additional contributions in the coming 52 weeks by: Haig Aivazian, Shaina Anand, Ayreen Anastas, Yto Berrada, Noel Doublas, Rana Jaleel, Rene Gabri, Mariam Ghani, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Josh MacPhee, Marina Naprushkina, Shirin Neshat, Ashok Sukumaran, WBYA (Who Builds Your Architecture), and many others.

Walid Raad, a member of Gulf Labor stated: “If the Guggenheim, Louvre and TDIC [Tourism, Development & Investment Company. Abu Dhabi] were willing to invest as much energy and resources into safeguarding the rights of workers buildings museums on Saadiyat Island, as they are on hiring “starchitects,” building engineering marvels, and buying challenging artworks, then their claims of building the best infrastructure for the arts in the world would be more than words in the wind.  Abu Dhabi, its residents and workers, deserve more than the “edgy” buildings and collections proposed by the best museum-brands in the world.  Abu Dhabi also deserves the development, implementation and enforcement of the most progressive labor laws for their emerging institutions.  If the museums can’t see this, then I can only hope that the ruling Sheikhs and Sheikhas will, and soon.”

Doris Bittar, a member of Gulf Labor stated: “Appearances are deceiving. The workers building the museums in Abu Dhabi look neat in their blue uniforms and hard hats. Their cared for appearance belie the facts that many are working 15-hour shifts, have had their passports confiscated and cannot leave or quit, they cannot congregate or collectively make demands regarding their lack of pay and their poor living conditions, and they have no recourse if they are physically abused because of unenforced labor laws. Sometimes, the only way they can leave and be sent home is in caskets.”

Guy Mannes-Abbott, a member of Gulf Labor stated: “Abu Dhabi is building urban infrastructure, cultural institutions and tourist facilities to developed-world standards using undeveloped-world methods: a cynical, unsustainable position and dreadful legacy. How much better for a future UAE to find a way now to embrace and recognise contributions made by those migrant workers who have actually made it what it is becoming. Responsibility for creating “conditions of forced labour” is shared by remittance-hungry and citizen-abandoning nations, declining western institutions repackaged as brands: the Louvre and Guggenheim, and their greedy architects: Vinoly, Nouvel, Gehry, Foster, but the agency of change is owned by the UAE.”

Naeem Mohaiemen, a member of Gulf Labor stated: “We note efforts to always push blame down the human-labor supply chain: corrupt middlemen, “illiterate” workers, or recruitment agencies in the origin countries. This avoids acknowledgment of the overwhelming power, and responsibility, in the hands of institutions in Abu Dhabi and within the Euro-American art axis.” 

About Gulf Labor: Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and unjust 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).

See the weekly contribution here: www.gulflabour.org

For additional information, please email: contact(at)gulflabor(dot)org

Who's Building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi?