Saturday 05.29.10 -- Gulf of Antinomies -- A Conversation with Emily, Maha, Tarek and friends

CONTENTS:

1. About this Saturday (at Fort Greene Park)
2. Background
3. Directions to the Park

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PLEASE NOTE:

This event will
be taking place at
at Ft. Greene Park
NOT at 16 Beaver
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1. About this Saturday

What: Conversation with Emily Jacir, Maha Maamoun, and Tarek Atoui
When: Saturday 05.29.10
Where: Fort Greene Park
When: 4:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all

Apologies for the short notice, but possibly, the late arrival of this notice will naturally make the size of our group small enough to allow a conversation to happen.

This Saturday, we would like to organize a public conversation that continues some of the dialogues that have been taking since the announcement of major investment projects in the (Arab) Gulf Region. Of course, Dubai and Abu Dhabi have received the most attention, but the breadth of those investments are taking place at different scales and intensities throughout the region. The extent of these developments touch on infrastructural projects, tourist developments, cultural tourism, educational initiatives, real estate speculation, new cities and suburbs, gated communities ... emerging throughout the region. And the ripples of that kind of investment whether in the sphere of cultural production or property speculation can be felt in Ramallah, Cairo, Beirut and beyond.

We would like to frame a conversation, one of many we may have had privately, or others have organized publicly, around these 'developments', their relation to wider dynamics in the world, which not only include the recent economic boom/crash cycles in many parts of the world, but also the war(s), the neoliberal virus, questions around money, labor, immigration, political rights, and much much more.

If the frame is very broad, the people who take part will allow us to focus. And we would like to invite a few friends as beginning points for that conversation (artists Emily Jacir, Maha Maamoun, and Tarek Atoui) and others who took part recently in the Homeworks forum organized in Beirut in April - which included an ambitious panel attempting to think about the larger impacts of the developments on the region. (For more on that panel organized by Ashkal Alwan, see below).

We hope to include people who are connected to or doing work related to the region and anyone else who is interested in how these processes relate to and/or impact other questions, struggles, issues.

The conversation will also take a particular focus on what could be done or undone with or within these processes.

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2. Background

On Saturday of April 24, 2010, there was a panel in Beirut Lebanon. Although that date happens to be the day that many Armenians and others around the world, including a significant Armenian community in Beirut commemorate the Armenian Genocide, the aforementioned panel was about an altogether different subject.

It was one of probably a hundred or so panels, convened in different cities at different times over the last few years, attempting to weigh in on the implications of the 'developments' and 'investments' in the United Arab Emirates and the Gulf to the cultural field, to the Arab world, to the middle east, to architectural practice, and to a long list of interconnected subjects.

The panel was part of Ashkal Alwan's Homeworks, the 5th forum on cultural practices which has been organized since 2002.

Walid Raad was the moderator of the discussion and it included panelists Vasif Kortun, Andrew Ross, Shumon Basar, Nada Shabout, Mishaal Al Gergawi.

The title and description of the event was as follows:
Where is Beirut, Ramallah, Cairo... From the Saadiyat Island? Arab and/or Emirati and/or Yet-More Islands of Happiness: The Making of Art, Artists, Art Histories, and Art Museums in the Arab World

'This panel will engage the social, historical, economic, cultural, political, and philosophical dimensions of the building of a massive new infrastructure for the visual and other arts in the Arabian Gulf. The participants to the panel will explore some old and new ways of living, dying, feeling, thinking, and the making and unmaking of forms, sounds, and gestures this new infrastructure has and/or can make possible.'

Some of the questions that were raised in that debate included:

- The impact that these rapid developments are having and will have on Arab cities and identities

- The question of exploitive labor practices and the complicity of collaborating institutions in not addressing these problems
(Andrew Ross spoke about the successful campaign to convince NYU and the local officials to agree to specific fair labor guidelines for building their campus in Abu Dhabi)

- The social, political and environmental impacts of these rapid changes materially and immaterially

- The possible impacts that these anticipated large investments in art and culture may have on institutions, criticism, and artistic practices in the region and beyond.

- The question of the relations and differences between local, semi-regional, and regional cultures/contexts

- The possibility that the entire process will turn out to be a bust, with sinking islands, abandoned developments, and cultural investments which will sink on account of their own weight

Maybe the biggest success of this panel was its ability to bring up many questions, without answering them. This is probably always the case. And one could say that saying this is an easy way to bypass the responsibilities that an event of a larger magnitude may be asked to take. But one possible response is that the forces that are being unleashed, the monies invested, the bodies and minds being mobilized in these investments, processes are immense. And any consideration of it that would do it justice, would require many more perspectives and positions.

In the case of this panel, sometimes the questions emerged, simply because they were found wanting. And in other cases, they were just fleeting remarks which needed time to consider further. Ultimately, one of the most urgent questions which was not addressed, but emerged was how not to see these processes as pre-scripted and eventual, but complex, unforeseeable and open-ended. And how to factor in or consider the agency of anyone who could foreseeably work in the region or do something connected to it. How not to see historic processes purely as spectator sports? And then, what and how to do? Where to begin?

And once one opens to this question of agency, one then begins a discussion of how and in what circumstances and manners one can inform, resist, detourn, alter, relate to, draw connections/lessons to/from these processes.

And maybe the most glaring task remained how not to isolate these developments from what is taking place on a much larger scale in general, and more specifically in the far east, in south asia, and beyond. How to find a way to consider these dynamics within the framework of the social, political, and economic questions of our time.

Maybe our small conversation can be seen as a public continuation of that event, with the implicit understanding that such an event can only be generative, if further conversations take place.

Of course, our informal sitting on the grass or on blankets and speaking, may not get at the breadth of questions that we might each bring to the table. But it will hopefully begin with considering a few specific positions about how the developments in the gulf are or are not related to our own work, thoughts, concerns, and places of inhabitance.

We are fortunate enough to have artists with us, who work in each of the cities invoked in the Beirut event's title.

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3. Directions to the Park

Ft. Greene Park is near the B,Q,M at Dekalb and many subways at Atlantic Center.

We will meet at the entrance to the park at Dekalb and Cumberland/Washington Park. Please try to arrive on time, but if you arrive late, there will be a phone number or two posted on a sheet of paper for locating the group.