Displaying culture: the politics of art, liberalism and the state in the UAE

Derderian, Elizabeth

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-xjaj-d883

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Displaying culture: the politics of art, liberalism and the state in the UAE

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International media immediately lambasted plans to build a Louvre and a Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the whimsy of wealthy sheikhs using oil money to “buy culture.” The museums are part of a $27b development project called Saadiyat Island. While Saadiyat is spectacular, dismissing it as inauthentic or a mere importation of culture overlooks the profound transformations in relationships between culture and the state that it entails and provokes. Existing literature demonstrates that historically, museums have drawn on domestic capital and resources to create citizens and canonize narratives of nation and heritage, thereby shaping hierarchies of belonging and exclusion in the nation (Bennett 1995; Duncan 1995; Lloyd and Thomas 1998). My study extends this literature by exploring a less understood phenomenon: how processes of citizen- and nation-making occur when the majority of staff, audiences, and objects in art and cultural institutions are transnational as foreign institutions build and control cultural infrastructure in contemporary capitalism. While museums have traditionally been a key domain of nation-building by showcasing what counts as a national culture, the objects and staff who constitute them increasingly extend the geographies of belonging beyond the nation. In an era of simultaneous resurgent nativism and claims to multiculturalism, these shifts in culture-state relations reveal new political hierarchies. Between the announcement of the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2007 and its opening in 2017, massive infrastructural change and growth transpired across the UAE’s cultural scene. Expatriates flooded in to staff new organizations; numerous programs emerged to train Emirati citizens for positions in the art world. My research captures a community in transition, focusing on artists of various nationalities in the UAE as these cultural imports rewrite local art histories according to dominant global art world criteria, gloss Euro-American cultural capital as “professionalism,” and favor English proficiency. I show how transnational cultural franchises reproduce Euro-American power structures and theoretical frameworks. During 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I worked with artists, cultural attachés, curators, and other arts staff, including long-term UAE residents of Arab descent, Emirati citizens, and short-term white collar expatriates from South Asia, Europe and the US. Through analysis of interviews, state cultural policies and bureaucratic infrastructures, and participant-observation at exhibitions, classes, art fairs, and public talks, I argue that state actors use the art of non-citizens to portray the UAE as tolerant and multicultural. For the state to appear tolerant, these non-citizen artists must remain outside the nation, despite their integral role in its representation. I also show how the state extends sovereignty to transnational cultural franchises, and how foreign staff in these institutions thus assume responsibility for representing the nation. Drawing on participant-observation with various art centers, attending art-related talks, openings, and courses, and visual and archival analysis of historical exhibition materials and artists’ works, I analyze the ways that expatriate professionals produce hierarchies of knowledge and practice and how local artists respond to and navigate the implementation of global art world infrastructures. Visits to galleries, museums and archives in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, alongside interviews with artists and directors in those countries, provided critical regional and political context. Ultimately this research is about power in the cultural realm: who claims to be cultured and civilized? In the current political climate where a liberal West is often set against a Muslim/Arab other, it is critical to understand the ways these hierarchies of distinction and power in the cultural realm are formed and contested.

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