Logbook Entry #13
After receiving Monira’s email, I was unsure about how best to respond- I wanted to make sure my intentions had been clear and that I was not ‘burning any bridges’ so to speak. As she wrote in her email about Myth Busters, it questions how cultural landscapes are formed and how they are shaped by conflict- I had taken this question as one that then implies the question “why are these museums here in this region?” In her essay about this work she asks:
“Why did Gulf governments suddenly feel the need to advertise their cultural production to western audiences? What was the underlying aim?… The Visibility Museums came to life because the survival of Gulf regimes became intertwined with the foreign policies of western governments and – more importantly – their populace’s image of these states. The new museums strove to advertise the beauty of Islam, local culture and contemporary art practices so as to create the facade of a ‘benevolent government’, which had become integral to maintaining successful defense policies.”
I saw Monira’s questions about why these museums are here as a type of critique. Maya’s response to my email asking how best to respond to Monira was helpful to understanding why she might have thought I had misread her work. Maya wrote that Monira’s challenge of my reading of her work: “goes to the heart of the issue with your capstone, which is that you are indirectly expanding and complicating the usual understanding of “institutional critique” — and you will have to decide consciously now whether that is what you are doing and what that means…It is an interesting position to take, that essentially, when institutions become so entwined with national-identity-building, what does it mean to ‘critique’ the institution? — where does one stop and the next start?”
I had been reading the GCC’s work and Monira’s series as untraditional types of institutional critique and trying to explain how they might be considered as such- but in this reading I had actually been stretching the definition of institutional critique. Is this my goal? Regardless of the stance I take on this, Maya wrote that I need to be sure to clarify my terms and my understanding of institutional critique in relation to the works in the exhibition for my audience. Both Maya and Salwa stressed what I can learn about curating and about the concept for my exhibition through this experience- and that it is something I should write about in my essay or reflection.
My next biggest concern was how exactly to talk with the Gulf Labor group about being in the exhibition. In her email, Monira wrote that she feared the Gulf Labor “will use this [exhibition] to create yet another “scandal” rather than really utilizing it as a real opportunity to discuss the issues in a meaningful way.” I met with Deb about this latest big shift in my capstone and we spoke about my uncertainty about how to move forward and how to interact with the Gulf Labor group. Deb reiterated to me that since I simply want to show work from the website- the 52 Weeks project (I am not instigating new work), and the works in this project are all open-source, that is available publicly to download, etc., I actually don’t need to go through them as the artist in order to show this work. She had made this point to me before, but for some reason I felt like there was something not fully ethical in using this work without at least informing the artists.
I still don’t really know where my reluctance towards this approach comes from. Really what I am doing with the 52 Weeks project by exhibiting it here at NYUAD is to place their work in a new and not neutral but actually rather charged context; charged because we are one of the institutions they are critiquing in this very work. So my plan is to reach out to Doris Bitar (to whom I had sent questions about the Gulf Labor’s work and her experience with is) and explain to her my concept for the exhibition, how I plan to use this work and why.
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