Loading ...Art and Hypocrisy in the Gulf
On May 11, the Lebanese artist Walid Raad was turned away at the airport when he tried to enter the United Arab Emirates, where the government is making a big investment in art with the Saadiyat Island project. The project, in the capital, Abu Dhabi, will include branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim as well as a campus of New York University.
Mr. Raad, who teaches at Cooper Union in New York, says he heard an Emirates immigration officer say that he was being turned away for security reasons.
The previous week, the Mumbai-based artist Ashok Sukumaran was denied a visa to enter the United Arab Emirates for undefined “security reasons.”
Others recently denied entry to the country on the vague pretext of security reasons include Andrew Ross, a New York University professor who has been fiercely critical of labor abuses on Saadiyat Island, and the journalist Sean O’Driscoll, who last year co-wrote a New York Times article on harsh labor conditions at the Abu Dhabi campus.
The exploitative labor system in the United Arab Emirates binds migrant workers to employers, who confiscate their passports as a matter of course, which makes it nearly impossible for the workers to escape abuse. Exorbitant recruitment fees and the prohibition of trade unions add to the toxic mix.
In 2010, the developers of Saadiyat Island promised special labor protections for the workers, but that has failed to stop all the abuses. The Times article last year found that workers had been beaten by police officers and arbitrarily deported when they went on strike to protest low pay. In February, Human Rights Watch documented serious shortcomings in the enforcement of the labor codes.
Mr. Raad and Mr. Sukumaran are both members of the Gulf Labor Coalition, which has been calling for a boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. The refusal to admit these artists, along with others pursuing creative and intellectual work, suggests that the United Arab Emirates and its development partners are unwilling to tolerate criticism and open debate.
In January 2014, as I left the country after doing research for our latest report on the treatment of the workers, the immigration authorities told me I was permanently blacklisted and could never return. They refused to give a reason.
On May 1, the Guggenheim described its Abu Dhabi project as “an opportunity for a dynamic cultural exchange and to chart a more inclusive and expansive view of art history.” John Sexton, who plans to retire as president of N.Y.U. next year, said something similar in 2007, when he described N.Y.U. and Abu Dhabi as “a good fit” and said that they shared “a belief that the evolving global dynamic will bring about the emergence of a set of world centers of intellectual, cultural and educational strength.” The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s website says it will be a place of “discovery, exchange and education” and describes it as “a product of the 18th century Enlightenment in Europe.”
Source: www.nytimes.com