Gulf Labor artist Walid Raad has been refused entry in the United Arab Emirates and put back on a plane back to the US, as he was heading to the Sharjah meetings (11–15 May), the artist reports on gulflabor.org.
Raad is not the first artist from Gulf Labor (a coalition protesting labour conditions in UAE in conjunction with the building of branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi) to see his entry denied into the country. The same thing happened to Ashok Sukumaran earlier in the month, and to NYU’s professor Andrew Ross in March this year.
In his statement, Raad deplores the lack of reaction and support from the big institutions of the likes of the Sharjah Biennial, Guggenheim and British Museum or NYU: ‘These museums, biennales, universities, and art fairs in the Gulf will invite you to speak, display and buy your artwork; they may even celebrate its “political” content as long as it is aimed at someone else. But stay clear of anything that hints of a local or regional “dynamic cultural exchange” because this is when things get dicey’.
Read the 2011 Power 100 profile of Walid Raad.
15 May 2015.
