AMCA Statement on Artistic Freedom in the United Arab Emirates

[Logo of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey] [Logo of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey]

AMCA Statement on Artistic Freedom in the United Arab Emirates

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey on 29 May 2015]

The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) condemns the entry ban UAE authorities have imposed on artists Walid Raad and Ashok Sukumaran and calls on UAE-based art institutions, including in particular the Guggenheim Museum, to convey their disapproval to UAE authorities and vocally dissociate themselves from the action. AMCA further calls on international arts organizations to condemn the complacency of art institutions that seek to benefit from the affluent Gulf region while condoning odious labor practices that have been systematically documented and consistently deplored locally. 

AMCA is an association of scholars, artists, and art practitioners that aims to advance the study of modern and contemporary art in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey. As an affiliate organization with both the College Arts Association (CAA) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), AMCA is the largest and only international association for academic research in the modern and contemporary arts of the Middle East.

In May 2015, both artists Raad and Sukumaran were separately denied entry to the UAE where they were to participate in the March Meeting (May 11-15, 2015), other cultural activities, and appointments with museum and government officials there. Sukumaran, who is based in Mumbai and has frequently worked in the UAE, was refused a visa. Raad was held at Dubai airport for 24 hours before being deported. Under similar circumstances, NYU professor Andrew Ross was pulled from his plane to Abu Dhabi in March 2015. All were told that they could not be allowed entry “for security reasons.” All are members of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition. (1)

That UAE authorities denied entry to three renowned members of the Gulf Labor Artists Coalition within two months suggests an attempt to forestall the empirical investigations on which the artists have based their art practices. Gulf Labor joins artists who foreground institutional critique in their work. For the past five years, its members have produced artwork and cultural events that highlight the harsh working conditions imposed on the behind-the-scenes workers who are bringing art institutions into existence in the UAE. The Louvre, the British Museum, and the Guggenheim have all participated in Gulf urban entrepreneurialism and benefitted from both the spectacular cultural competition and the notorious infringements on laborers’ rights, especially construction workers but now sympathetic artists, too.

That UAE authorities labeled all three Gulf Labor members “security threats” may sound bizarre, unless we take seriously that the UAE monarchs feel threatened by the exposure artists may bring to their exploitative labor laws. These laws currently prohibit unions, labor organizations, strikes, and independent contracting. They have been called neo-slavery by international human rights institutions, and it is this very inequity that artists seek to reveal. (2)

AMCA notes the long involvement of artists in the region in movements against oppression and suppression. Artists were at the forefront of anti-colonial and anti-imperial thought that led to the liberation of the region in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Artists have actively and creatively contributed to uprisings and campaigns for social justice throughout the region. AMCA protests and condemns actions by the UAE authorities that deprive regional populations of their connection to this important resource for renewing social thought and envisioning an equitable future.

Based on this hard-earned legacy, AMCA warns all patrons of the arts against trying to paint social and legal infrastructures with a veneer of cultural freedom and creativity while seeking to determine what realities art institutions overlook or make visible. Colonial powers sought to use art in the region in the same manner in the 1920s-50s, and “soft power” continues to operate this way today, to make audiences disregard deeper, endemic abuses of state power. Freedom of expression in the arts must not be compromised.

Nada Shabout, President and Founding Board Member

Sarah Rogers, President-Elect and Founding Board Member

Pamela Karimi, Treasurer

Jessica Gerschultz, Secretary

 

 

See Stephanie Saul, “N.Y.U. Professor Is Barred by United Arab Emirates,” The New York Times, March 16, 2015. Available at

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/nyregion/nyu-professor-is-barred-from-the-united-arab-emirates.html?_r=2; Walid Raad, “Denied Entry and Deported,” open letter published May 15, 2015. Available at http://gulflabor.org/2015/artist-gulf-labor-member-walid-raad-denied-entry-and-deported-from-the-uae/

 

 

(2) See Human Rights Watch, “Migrant Workers’ Rights on Saadiyat Island in the United Arab Emirates,” February 10, 2015. Available at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2015/02/10/migrant-workers-rights-saadiyat-island-united-arab-emirates-0 

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”

    • Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes

      Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes
      Long Form Podcast(Episodes 7, 8, & 9) Upcoming Guests:Mandy TurnerHala RharritHatem Bazian Hosts:Mouin RabbaniBassam Haddad   Watch Here:Youtube.com/JadaliyyaX.com/Jadaliyya There can be

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412