With apologies, our presenter has taken ill and the event had to be cancelled.

The Gulf states are investing heavily in culture. Since the early 2000s, a bumper crop of museums, commercial galleries, art fairs, heritage sites, festivals, and cultural districts have opened their doors to the public. Cultural professionals and practitioners working in the Gulf are keenly aware that censorship and the exploitation of migrant construction workers shapes cultural production in these new spaces. And yet progressive politics – particularly decoloniality and postcolonialism – remain the niche that this scene is carving out for itself in the global artworld. This talk prises apart this seeming contradiction, exploring culture as an agent of economic and urban development and site of political governance. It maps the global disciplines, industries, and technical abstractions behind the physical construction of culture in the Gulf. By reconstructing these industrial circuits - of labour, capital and ideas - this talk uses art to probe how race and capitalism combine in a place that does not fit neatly within the theoretical paradigms developed in relation to the transatlantic slave trade and European colonial encounter.
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EVENT CANCELLED