Who is building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

Gulf Labor Coalition (GLC)
Founded in New York City, USA , in 2011.
Based in New York City.

Gulf Labor Coalition (GLC) is a self-organized group of artists, writers, architects, curators, and other cultural workers who are trying to ensure that workers’ rights are protected when contemporary art, precarious labor, and global capital intersect. GLC’s primary focus has been on the construction of Western-branded cultural institutions, including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum now underway on Saadiyat Island (also called “The Island of Happiness”) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE ). Abu Dhabi is a wealthy oil- and gas-producing city that imports vast armies of migrant workers, but denies them their basic civil rights. GLC grew out of a letter-writing campaign in 2010 in which several individuals met with officials at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City to discuss the ethics of their participation in the Saadiyat Island construction project.
A year later, the Gulf Labor Coalition was established and immediately launched a public boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (GAD). Since then, almost two thousand artists, curators, writers, and others have signed on to the boycott, agreeing not to sell artworks to, accept commissions from, or participate in events on behalf of the GAD. Most recently GLC completed “52 Weeks,” a year-long campaign (October 2013 to October 2014) in which artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries contributed a work, a text, or an action each week highlighting the coercive recruitment and the deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi. Much of this work is visible online, at http://gulflabor.org/. Periodically, Gulf Labor members visit UAE labor camps to conduct research. After the last trip, the visiting team issued a report on its findings and recommendations. Gulf Labor spinoffs include: G.U.L.F. (Global Ultra Luxury Faction) a direct action group that has mounted several occupations of the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Gulf Labor West, which draws parallels between the working conditions in the Persian Gulf region and those of migrant workers from the Gulf of Mexico and Latin America; and Who Builds Your Architecture (WBYA), an initiative that puts pressure on the architectural profession in regard to its ethical responsibilities toward those who erect its buildings.
Most recently Gulf Labor members helped to organize “The Next Helsinki,” a design competition launched as an alternative to the proposed Guggenheim Helsinki. GLC’s practice takes place in a public context that pivots on the imaginative and tactical leveraging of our aggregated cultural and social capital, whether that coercion is a research project, a direct action in the lobby of a major museum, or a performance on a city sidewalk. GLC insists that no one should be asked to exhibit, perform, or teach in a facility built on the backs of abused workers. At the Biennale di Venezia, Gulf Labor will present a report of their extensive recent research in India and UAE in a series of plenary discussions and presentations organized over several days in July and August in the ARENA.