[This interview is the result of a month-long email conversation between the activists of Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) and Jadaliyya's Arabian Peninsula page editorial team.]
Nate Christensen and John Warner (NC and JW): Can you give us a brief introduction to your work as artists and activists and to the political actions of G.U.L.F.? Can you describe how your work with G.U.L.F. fits in with your broader artistic visions?
Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.): G.U.L.F. stands for Global Ultra Luxury Faction. Our name is important to emphasize at the outset as our artistic vision does indeed have a global dimension that both encompasses and surpasses migrant workers as bonded labor in Abu Dhabi which our recent actions highlight. A coalition of groups, including Tidal, Occupy Museums, MTL, NYU Fair Labor Coalition, and members of Gulf Labor, established G.U.L.F. as an autonomous offshoot of the ongoing Gulf Labor Campaign (GLC). For the past three years, GLC has targeted the Guggenheim museum over concerns about the working and living conditions of the tens of thousands of migrant workers involved in the construction of the cultural district on Saadiyat Island, where a new branch of the Guggenheim franchise will be located.
Since February 2014, G.U.L.F. has undertaken two performative interventions within the walls of the museum in New York City, both of which generated highly visible coverage in the global media. These were punctuated by a guerilla projection onto the facade of the building and the launching of globalguggenheim.org, a platform that mimics the appearance of the Guggenheim's own website and which announces the cancellation of Frank Gehry’s current design for the museum in favor of a visionary design competition open to the public and based on principles of sustainability and social justice. The coming weeks and months will likely involve further disturbances and escalation from G.U.L.F. At the same time, we will be developing and promoting the Global Guggenheim competition-platform in advance of an autumn offensive targeting the museum. This will be undertaken in alliance with a network of artists, architects, writers, and curators that has grown exponentially since we started our action-sequence in February. Unless it demonstrates a good faith effort to use its immense cultural and economic power to reshape labor conditions in Saadiyat and thus set a standard for the region and beyond, the Guggenheim should expect G.U.L.F. to remain on the offensive.
With this recent sequence of interventions, we wanted to introduce an element of creative direct action to the original GLC campaign. Doing so would amplify the campaign’s message and turn up the heat on its target. Importantly, it would incorporate the campaign into a larger narrative concerning the role that artistic and cultural institutions play in neoliberal globalization whether in Abu Dhabi, Berlin, New York, or Brazil. The ultimate target of G.U.L.F is thus not just the Guggenheim or its subcontractors in Abu Dhabi, but the economic and political system in which museums play an important role—a system that is geared toward the interests of the global one percent.
The artistic vision of G.U.L.F. is not only a matter of negative critique or protest. G.U.L.F. is also about affirming the power and beauty of art, though we understand this term to mean something rather different than the way that, for example, the Guggenheim would. For us, the most relevant forms of art involve direct action, unsolicited interventions, and political organizing that challenge the institutional frames of museums, galleries, festivals, and academic establishments. This is a spirit that many of us encountered during our work in Occupy Wall Street, in which the boundary between art, media, and organizing dissolved in the same way it did in other situations of political rupture around the world—including the occupations of Tahrir Square and Gezi Park. For G.U.L.F., art in the broadest sense can involve forms of collective creativity that open space for alternatives to the privatized and exploitative cultures of neoliberalism.
NC and JW: Does G.U.L.F. build on a longer tradition of artistic engagement with the migrant workers in the Arab Gulf states? How have your strategies of transnational activism been negotiated within G.U.L.F. and how have you built solidarity between G.U.L.F. and workers in the Arabian Peninsula?
G.U.L.F.: Yes. G.U.L.F. would not be possible without the longer-term work of the GLC referred to above, in addition to the work of legitimate independent monitoring groups such as Human Rights Watch and Migrant Rights. The original GLC initiative involved the participation of more than one hundred prominent artists from all around the world in a boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. The boycotters now number more than two thousand. This boycott campaign has been supplemented by the 52 Weeks campaign, which involves a weekly email blast of a new art project that engages the Guggenheim conflict and its attendant issues. A number of the artists participating in GLC hail from South Asia and work alongside labor rights organizations to pressure the Indian and Bangladeshi governments, for instance, to enforce regulations against the illegal recruitment fees that form one link in the chain of exploitation of these workers. Each of the labor source countries has a long history of militant and creative labor organizing and mobilization that we hope to better engage. An important point of reference is the government of the Philippines, which has been much more proactive in cracking down on exploitative recruiters because of pressure by migrant worker organizations in the country, and advocates for better treatment and better pay on behalf of its citizens in the receiving host countries.
There is still much for us to learn from workers themselves about the operations of the system in both source and receiving countries. We hope that the combined efforts of G.U.L.F. and GLC amplify the voices of workers as well as to form critical connections with other artists and activists in source countries such as India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the Philippines. The problems that workers are experiencing on Saadiyat Island are not unique to that location, and part of our work is to help connect worker struggles across the globe.
NC and JW: From the work you have produced for Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks campaign, it seems that transnational debt is central to your analysis of exploitation in the art world. Can you further elaborate on the connections between debt, labor exploitation, and global artistic production?
G.U.L.F.: Indebtedness is central to the international chain of exploitation that we are targeting. Most immediately, we are concerned with the sponsorship [kafala] system of debt-bondage in which migrant workers from South Asia are entangled. The privatization of land and the displacement of subsistence or small farms, along with skewed neoliberal economic policies that have favored urban elites across South Asia over the last two decades have put enormous pressure on workers betting on higher paid foreign jobs. They enter the Gulf economies most often as doubly bonded. First, they are in debt to their recruiters at home, and they are then indentured to the host country employers on whom they depend for their work visas. Thus, most of their meager income goes to service the debt they incurred by coming to work in Abu Dhabi in the first place, with no redress regarding their labor and living conditions. Once they are in the Gulf debt trap, the migrants are put to work building the kind of overleveraged, speculative developments that have made the United Arab Emirates a major node on the landscape of high finance.
As suggested by No Debt Is An Island, a contribution to Gulf Labor's 52 Weeks series by the group MTL, the debt-servitude of the migrant workers is only the most brutal end of the spectrum of the global debt-based economy at work in Abu Dhabi and other locations of cultural development throughout the world. In the Global North, we have generations of young people going into a lifetime of debt-service in order to pursue the dream of higher education, including that of becoming an artist—a field of activity associated, ironically enough, with freedom and self-determination. The conditions of students in the Global North, while not equivalent to those of migrant workers in the Gulf, are nevertheless quite precarious and governed by ruthless forms of market competition. The great majority of students do not "make it" into the exclusive top-tier of the galleries, museums, and academic institutions that would ever pay them enough to make ends meet, and they are instead forced to turn to consumer credit and part time service work to support themselves, becoming debtors two-times over. First to the school—with yearly tuitions as high as fifty thousand dollars—and second, to the personal debt industry that has exploded over the past few decades in tandem with the stagnation of wages and chronic underemployment. The dynamics of precarity and debt certainly do not only affect students and artists, who are by and large relatively privileged when we think of education and cultural capital. The legions of security guards and janitorial workers—primarily people of color—that maintain the spaces of the institutions in which we contemplate artistic treasures are themselves low wage, precarious workers for whom predatory credit is an essential part of their lives.
Yet another level in which debt intersects with the cultural field is that of governmental debt-service and its associated processes of structural adjustment. A prominent example in the US is the bankruptcy of Detroit and the Emergency Management austerity plan that had been set up there to pay off municipal bondholders. Vital social resources—ranging from education to electricity and even to the holdings of the Detroit Institute for the Arts—are hemorrhaging upwards from the population to Wall Street. This makes way for new rounds of what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.” As the city is broken down and cleared out by austerity, the bohemian cultural sector is already creeping into the ruins of Detroit as the avant-garde of “urban revival.” An important countervailing force in Detroit are groups and institutions like the Boggs Center, which understand art and culture as having an important role to play in cultivating neighborhood-based communities of resistance, survival, and liberation in the face of Wall Street’s “disaster capitalism.”
Finally, we should not neglect to mention the perennial fact that the collection, display, and sponsorship of art has long played an import role in the public self-legitimization of economic elites throughout the history of capitalism, including the one percent financiers who preside over our contemporary debt-economy. Along with cultural prestige, art is also a storehouse of speculative investment. It is both a matter of conspicuous consumption and wealth creation for Wall Street.