Former artistic directors of Documenta: Rudi Fuchs, Catherine David, Okwui Enwezor, Roger M. Buergel, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and the director of the forthcoming Documenta 14 (in 2017), Adam Szymczyk, have issued a letter to the Sheikh Sultan Bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, the chair of Abu Dhabi’s Tourism and Culture Authority, in support of Andrew Ross, Ashok Sukumaran, and Walid Raad, three members of the Gulf Labor Coalition (a group seeking to improve labour conditions on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island) who were denied entry to the United Arab Emirates last May.
The signatories wrote that ‘Given the peaceful nature of these three individuals, we may unfortunately presume that the reason these three members of our global arts and academic community were denied entry to the UAE is because of their involvement with the Gulf Labor Coalition’, and invited the UAE to lift these bans ‘in the name of art and culture, and freedom of passage for well-meaning people.’
This missive follows two other attempts to lift the ban, made after Raad and Sukumaran were prevented from attending the Sharjah Art Foundation’s March Meeting — one letter issued by a majority of the participating artists in the Sharjah Biennial and another signed by sixty prominent curators, critics and museum directors.
6 July 2015.
