GULF Archives -

GULF back at Guggenheim

“Last night, in a visually dazzling act of public protest, the artist-activist groups Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) and the Illuminator turned the spiral facade of the Guggenheim Museum into a projection screen. From a van double-parked on Fifth Avenue, they broadcasted messages condemning the Guggenheim Foundation’sbreaking off negotiations with the Gulf Labor Coalition about migrant worker rights at the museum’s Abu Dhabi outpost.”

http://hyperallergic.com/294500/protesters-shame-guggenheim-and-its-trustees-with-light-projections/

Occupation of Guggenheim Venice

Global Ultra Luxury Faction/ Gulf Labor worked with S.a.L.E Docks to stage an occupation of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice following the May 1 action in New York.

I designed flags and other graphics.

Here is the Press Release for the Venice Action.

May 8, 2015, Venice. At the opening of the Venice Biennale, a premier art exposition run on underpaid and free local labor, members of G.U.L.F. (Global Ultra Luxury Faction) and Gulf Labor Coalition declare their solidarity with migrant workers in the U.A.E. by occupying the Venice Guggenheim museum. The Gulf Labor Coalition, an international group of artists and writers, and an official participant in this year’s Biennale, has been pressuring the museum for five years to ensure fair labor standards for the workers constructing its new Saadiyat Island branch in Abu Dhabi. Neither the museum nor its Emirati partner has responded with any adequate program of protections. After five years of inaction, G.U.L.F. decided to follow last week’s occupation of the Guggenheim New York by targeting the Venice museum.

S.a.L.E.-Docks, the Venice arts collective, is also participating in the occupation. The joint action will draw attention to the exploitative use of unpaid workers to staff the expositions in Venice, Milan, and beyond.

A series of field investigations has established a systematic pattern of human rights abuse among migrant workers in the Emirates. While Abu Dhabi has the roaring wealth to purchase the names of high-profile cultural institutions like the Guggenheim, Louvre, British Museum, and New York University, it will not afford dignity and fair wages to the migrants who make up 90% of its population. Compliance monitoring programs put in place by NYU were not adequately enforced, and hundreds of workers who stood up for their rights were beaten and deported.

The Gulf Labor Coalition has asked for the Guggenheim to:

1) pay a living wage to its museum workforce;

2) reimburse workers for their crushing recruitment debts;

3) respect their right to self-organize.

The Foundation has responded that meeting these demands lies “outside the Guggenheim’s range of authority,” because “they are matters of federal law.” According to Andrew Ross, a New York University labor expert and Gulf Labor Coalition member, “nothing in UAE labor law prevents an employer from compensating workers for recruitment fees. In fact, the employment practices policy on Saadiyat Island specifically instructs them to do so.”More than two thousand artists around the world have signed on to the Gulf Labor’s boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi over the lack of fair labor provisions. G.U.L.F. intends to target the museum until the Foundation takes the demands seriously, and agrees to a meeting between trustees and its own representatives. “We are stepping up the pressure,” explains Amin Husain, artists and G.U.L.F. organizer. “Rather than passing the buck on to Abu Dhabi authorities who have shown scant concern for migrants’ rights, the Foundation should face up to its responsibilities and clean the stain from the Guggenheim’s name.”

The final phase of construction on the museum’s UAE branch will commence later this year on Saadiyat Island, a showpiece real estate venture off the coast of Abu Dhabi. “No artist should be asked to exhibit work in a museum built on the backs of abused workers,” observed Nitasha Dhillon, artist and G.U.L.F. member. “And the Guggenheim Foundation can ensure this will never happen by doing the right thing by workers now, before construction begins.”According to Marco Baravalle, member of the S.a.L.E.-Docks arts collective, “the Venice Biennale, like so much of the artworld, is the product of free, or cheap, labor. The more prestigious an art event is, the more likely that people are asked to work for nothing.”

Members of G.U.L.F. , the Gulf Labor Coalition, and S.a.L.E.-Docks are available for interview.

Press:

Gulf Labor and Other Arts Groups Occupy Venice’s Guggenheim #GuggOccupied

The Guggenheim and Protesters Both Respond to #GuggOccupied in Venice

http://artforum.com/news/id=52078

Gulf Labor Stages Protest at Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice

Countdown to Abu Dhabi: GULF banner drop and picket at Guggenheim

On November 6th, the Guggenheim Museum will host one of the premier fund-raising events for New York’s high society. Guests will be feasting royally at $75,000 tax-deductible tables. On the other side of the world, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s migrant workers are being exploited while having meager rations on their plates and very little time to prepare their meals after a punishing 12 hour workday.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1547011045535097/?ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular

G.U.L.F Guggenheim Actions

Spring 2014, I joined forces with Gulf Labor and Tidal on a series of actions (ongoing) to pressure the Guggenheim Museum to adopt fair labor practices building its new museum in Abu Dhabi. New editions of the Lourvre, NYU Campus, and Guggeheim Museum are being build on a luxury island called Saadiyat (“Island of Happiness” on the backs of indebted migrant laborers.

We also launched Global Guggenheim website and Design Competition.

Statement from Global Ultral Luxury Faction:

Each time the Guggenheim speaks, its approach to migrant labour issues on Saadiyat Island sounds more like that of a global corporation than that of an educational or art institution. We would like to remind the Guggenheim that it’s a museum, with a mission to “explore ideas across cultures through dynamic curatorial and educational initiatives.” Museums should help the public come to a greater understanding of the global complexities we all face.

Each day the Guggenheim hides behind the excuse that “construction has not yet started on our building” is another day of evading decisions and actions which could prevent a future migrant worker’s servitude. Right now, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s infrastructure is being constructed. That infrastructure includes roads, sewage, water, electric, net pipes, etc., leading to the museum. But other components of the work are also under way. We can only assume that money has been transferred to the Guggenheim here in New York in order to hire the curators and administrators of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. We know that events off-site have already been organized. Works of art have certainly been bought, insured, and stored. Last but not least, Saadiyat Island is being sold to investors on the basis of the Guggenheim’s name, along with those of the Louvre, the British Museum and others. How can the Guggenheim claim that construction has not begun?

Even if we were to take at face value the claim that construction of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has not begun, we would say the following: NOW thousands of workers who will build your museum are taking on the massive debt that will take them years to repay; NOW workers are being recruited with promises that will not be fulfilled, for jobs that will pay less than they expected; NOW workers are applying for the passports that may be confiscated as soon as they land in the UAE; and, surely, NOW is the time to do something about all of this.

It is unfortunate but not surprising that the Guggenheim refuses to open its doors to a serious public dialogue about the migrant labor issues in Abu Dhabi. A museum of its stature must foster public education about the conditions under which art is viewed. The Guggenheim is stepping back from this social responsibility as it focuses on expanding into new global markets.

As for the underpaid Guggenheim guards’ wages in New York, passing off culpability to a subcontractor is no longer an acceptable practice, even in the corporate world. The Guggenheim should pay all employees at least a living wage, even if they are on a contractor’s payroll.

Sadly, the Guggenheim’s latest response confirms our expectation. It has tried to hide behind technicalities and PR spin as it waits for news cycles to die down. We know the composition of their board and it does not surprise us. A 1% Global Museum with a 1% Board that cares very little about its lowest-paid employees and the example it is setting to the world.

We will be back.

Newsweek: Protesters Sneak Into the Guggenheim, Make It Rain False Bills

By Zoë Schlanger

http://www.newsweek.com/protesters-sneak-guggenheim-make-it-rain-false-bills-238877

The scene at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum on pay-as-you-wish evening this Saturday was soggy. Throngs of damp visitors, having been undeterred by the spring rainstorm and block-long line, mingled on the spiraling ramps for the museum’s exhibit of Italian Futurist art. Suddenly, a bell clanged, and a moment later, thousands of colorful slips of paper fluttered down from the balconies like confetti. Looking up from the rotunda had the cheerfully surreal effect of being within a snow globe. Visitors looked mostly happy and confused, and snatched the bits of paper as they fell.

“Is this part of the show?” one woman asked her companion. “I have no clue,” the other replied.

The paper turned out to be false dollar bills, intricately illustrated by Occupy Wall Street-affiliated artist Noah Fischer. One side of the bill read, “No Sustainable Cultural Value,” above a sketch of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim soon to be built in Abu Dhabi. The other side was sketched with a protest scene, the red “Joie de Vivre” sculpture of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in the background. An image of the globe was wrapped in the question “What does an ethical global museum look like?” The upper edge read, “By the authority of s**it is f****d up & bulls*t.”

Zoe Schlanger

The bills were flung over the balconies by an activist political group called GULF (Global Ultra Luxury Faction), an affiliate of the activist groups Gulf Labor and Occupy Museums. A few days before, the group launched a fake Guggenheim website, where it is hosting a design competition for a “sustainable” Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. GULF got significant press last month for a similar interruption, when it unfurled banners over the Guggenheim ramps painted with the words “1% Museum,” “Abu Dhabi” and “Wage Theft.”

Both “interventions” were staged to protest what participants described as the indentured servitude of migrant laborers on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, where the new Guggenheim franchise will be built alongside the under-construction branch of the Louvre museum and a campus of New York University.

After the first protest, longtime New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote an article assessing the risk globalizing museums face of resembling multinational corporations built for the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

“What if seemingly incompatible institutional features—humane local wisdom and custodianship of treasures of art—could be made to coexist?” Cotter asks. “We’d have museums that are on the right side of history, and in which the future of art would be secure. That ideal is worth storming an empire for.”

Zoe Schlanger

In an op-ed published in the Times the same day as the second protest, NYU professor Andrew Ross, one of the main organizers behind GULF, urged the Guggenheim to establish good labor practices in a region where migrant laborers typically work for years to repay recruitment and relocation fees under the kafala sponsorship system and endure miserable conditions, as recently reported by The Guardian.

“If liberal cultural and educational institutions are to operate with any integrity in that environment, they must insist on a change of the rules,” Ross wrote.

Migrant labor is the majority of the population of the United Arab Emirates, where development continues at a breakneck pace. Over the past few years, Abu Dhabi has brought in tens of thousands of laborers to transform Saadiyat Island into a thriving $27 billion cultural development.

GULF

In 2009, a Human Rights Watch report found that workers had to “work for months or years simply to pay off their loans” from recruitment and relocation fees, and some employers reduced workers’ wages after hiring and withheld their passports, threatening fees to return them. By 2010, both NYU Abu Dhabi and the state-run Tourism Development & Investment Co. (TDIC) had announced new labor practices, praised by Human Rights Watch, that made contractors responsible for all recruitment fees and barred them from withholding passports.

PricewaterhouseCoopers was hired by the government to audit employer compliance each year, and NYU brought on a compliance monitor as well, though its independence has been questioned: Mott MacDonald, the contractor hired by NYU, is also “in charge of the electricity and responsible for [maintaining] the sewage and gas” in Abu Dhabi, according to Human Rights Watch’s Nick McGeehan.

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report released in December 2013 and analyzed by The New Yorker, some problem areas have improved: 100 percent of workers interviewed said they had “free access” to their passports, the instance of wage deductions had gone down, and more workers had access to better living quarters. Yet the kafala fees were even more widespread than before: 86 percent of the workers said they had paid recruitment fees, compared with 75 percent in 2012.

Zoe Schlanger

Within eight minutes of the bills fluttering down through the Guggenheim’s spiraling space, guards had cordoned off the rotunda and swept away most of the bills that plastered the rotunda floor and floated above the pennies in the museum fountain. Within an hour, New York City police had arrived.

Zoe Schlanger

The Guggenheim’s deputy director of global communications, Eleanor Goldhar, said in a statement that the museum is “currently engaged in ongoing, serious discussions with our most senior colleagues in Abu Dhabi and TDIC, the authority responsible for building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum, regarding workers’ rights. Our chairman of the board of trustees and director have just recently returned from meetings in Abu Dhabi where this issue was a top priority for discussion.”

The statement continues:

As global citizens, we share the concerns about human rights and fair labor practices and continue to be committed to making progress on these issues. At the same time, it is important to clarify that the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is not currently under construction, despite erroneous claims by certain protesters. The building foundations and pilings were completed in 2011.

While in Abu Dhabi in mid-March 2014, our director revisited the workers village to ensure that living conditions for workers who will work on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will set new and respected standards for workers engaged in building other projects on Saadiyat Island.

Art in America: Protesting the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi: An Interview with G.U.L.F.

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/protesting-the-guggenheim-in-abu-dhabi-an-interview-with-gulf/

by Matthew Shen Goodman

Courtesy G.U.L.F.

Last Saturday, during the opening weekend of the Guggenheim’s “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe,” some forty protestors proceeded to drop banners, hand out fliers and recite chants, all targeting the labor conditions for migrant workers on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island—the intended home of, among other institutions, franchises of the Guggenheim, the Louvre and New York University. These conditions have been under intense scrutiny by human rights organizations, trade and labor unions and politicians, following reports of widespread abuses that include the withholding of workers’ passports, squalid living conditions, poverty-level wages and illegal recruiting fees.

Under the auspices of G.U.L.F., or the Global Ultra Luxury Faction, the protesting group comprised artists, students and members of activist groups Occupy Museums, NYU’s Student Labor Action Movement and Gulf Labor. G.U.L.F.’s actions were quickly met with a response by Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong, leading to a series of exchanges, including G.U.L.F.’s follow-up response, the Guggenheim’s answers to queries posed by Hyperallergic, and G.U.L.F.’s reaction to those answers.

A.i.A. met with G.U.L.F. members Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, who formed the artist collaborative MTL after meeting at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and Noah Fischer, artist and member of Occupy Museums, to discuss Saturday’s events, the Guggenheim’s importance in Abu Dhabi, and their hopes for future actions.

MATTHEW SHEN GOODMAN Can you describe what happened at the protest, and the efforts leading up to it?

AMIN HUSAIN Gulf Labor has been in existence for several years and, to invigorate their campaign and put more pressure on institutions like the Guggenheim, they recently launched “52 Weeks” [a year-long project in which artists and activists are invited to contribute a work, text or action highlighting the working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi]. MTL was invited to participate by Gulf Labor member and NYU professor of sociology Andrew Ross, so we produced this analysis and began to organize an action over the course of a few months. We invited everyone we thought had a stake in this: from NYU community members and organizations to artists and activists. The intention was to occupy the space in every dimension—with sound, images and presence—as long as we could. We’ve done banner drops before, but with the Guggenheim we had to figure out things like how you’d smuggle in a banner, let alone many banners, whether there’s an aesthetic you’re going to use because of the Futurism exhibit, etc.

The day of, we actually met on the front steps of the Met in advance, and we recited everything we were going to do very loudly, to get people to break their inhibitions. Then we all headed towards the Guggenheim. Some of us were already there—Nitasha and I actually got in using our Whitney IDs, so at 5:15 there were five of us scouting the place and bringing in over 500 fliers that we’d hidden in tote bags.

NITASHA DHILLON We’d made the banners out of Mylar blankets which can be folded up pretty tightly, so people tuck them into their pants. The protestors were divided into five teams, each assigned to different floors, and within those groups there were different roles. One person would hold the banner, one person would speak at the top of their lungs, and another person would deescalate, which meant telling the guards that the whole thing was a performance related to the Futurism show and that it’d be done in a second. The bugle started it off, and we all began to recite the script. All of the visitors came to us and started to listen. At the end people clapped, which was kind of fascinating.

SHEN GOODMAN Do you ever receive the criticism that you’re singling out the Guggenheim, perhaps unfairly?

DHILLON: They’ve certainly gotten numerous institutions together—including the Louvre, NYU and the British Museum—to build a cultural paradise for incredibly wealthy people. As for the idea that we’re targeting a select institution, we’re acting where we’re at, which is here in New York. Furthermore, Saadiyat Island is being built onyour cultural capital. [The Guggenheim] is the name that’s attracting investment and other institutions to the island. It’s part of the economy and the PR image, so there’s no way the museum is not part of the problem. These abuses are happening as we speak.

SHEN GOODMAN What makes this action a success, in your eyes, and what would you like to come out of it?

NOAH FISCHER: I think it’s already been a success in many ways. You see people online working it out for themselves, which is proof that we’re changing the conversation. With a certain level of misinformation, politics isn’t possible—what we’re doing here is challenging the Guggenheim’s press releases about the situation. That’s why we’re calling on the museum to have an open assembly: there can be a difference from these press salvos, and I think that’d be good for everybody.

HUSAIN: We already won, in one sense. The idea that we can gather forty people, create this coalition, go in and occupy the Guggenheim for 25 minutes, co-opting their media mechanism and starting a public discourse about this issue—that’s a win. In terms of what we see next, it’s a win if they have an independent monitor that will hold them accountable and be beneficial to the workers. It’d be a win if they’d open up their doors and have a conversation with us.

FISCHER: It’s a win for art, because we’re artists. The idea that activism or political art is somehow separate is bullshit, because all art is political. A lot of people are talking about the emptied-out aesthetics that the market prefers, and I think that with these actions we’re proposing a practice that’s walking in a direction of a new reality. If the Guggenheim decided to host an assembly about this issue, we’d be creating culture together. We’d be flying the flag of what art can be in our times.

Collective Statement from G.U.L.F

We will be back.

G.U.L.F.(Global Ultra Luxury Faction)