Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the name of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished.
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song,
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Years’ War. Who
Else won it?
Every page a victory.

Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.

—Bertolt Brecht, “Questions from A Worker Who Reads”

Rooted in Marxist ideology, Brecht’s poem states what should perhaps be obvious, but isn’t: no art context is innocent and one cannot look, produce, practice, and speak about art without considering its settings, terms, and conditions. Founded in 2011 in New York City, Gulf Labor Artist Coalition is a loose association of international artists raising another Brechtian question: who is building Guggenheim Abu Dhabi on Saadiyat Island in United Arab Emirates? For seven years Gulf Labor, in a unique strategy merging art, activism, and human rights, has been bringing awareness to the conditions of migrant workers constructing the franchise of “be the largest of the Guggenheim museums.”

The Saadiyat Island or the Island of Happiness is supposed to host some of the most prestigious cultural and academic institutions of the planet, such as the Louvre, New York University, the British Museum, and the Guggenheim, and by 2020 become the cultural center of Abu Dhabi attracting “high-end clientele just like Bilbao, Paris, or New York” and implementing the opulent “Gulf dream.” The UAE’s population of approximately 9 million people is composed of 90% migrant workers, including some international corporate expats, but predominantly contracted migrant workers recruited from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, or the Philippines—with no formal rights to association, representation, or negotiation over their often much-worse than-promised working conditions. Any attempt to dissent and holding the employer accountable is silenced and can lead to arrest and deportation. Gulf Labor has been boldly and successfully calling on academic and cultural institutions constructed on Saadiyat Island to enforce uniform rules for human rights protection, such as just recruitment fees and relocation costs, and the freedom to change jobs or to form trade unions.

Gulf Labor’s prowess and import is notable for four aspects.

The first regards the performative and political way in which Gulf Labor employs a strategy of boycott, its signature claim being that no work sold to the Guggenheim may be exhibited in Abu Dhabi until the demands are met. It’s interesting to compare it with other boycotts of recent Biennales that occurred regularly between 2013 and 2015, such as in Istanbul, São Paulo, St. Petersburg, or Sydney. Those boycotts also aimed to challenge the politics of art and expose, or even end, what has been called art washing. They resulted from recent political upheavals such as Occupy Wall Street, the rise of artivism, and the willingness of art to offer more than just a self-critical attitude. However, in most cases they were, unlike Gulf Labor, primarily symbolic: they did not seek long-term alliances with existing social movements, but rather operated through the economy of momentum. Gulf Labor does both: using the visibility produced by artists (through numerous actions and happenings with its sister group G.U.L.F) and linking their cause to empower the long-term and tedious work of human rights organizations.

Secondly, Gulf Labor doesn’t produce art that saves the world, and they know it is too pretentious to think that art can do so on its own. Rather they choose to engage in activism as artists, joggling and playing with both roles, and empowering rather than disempowering both positions.

Thirdly, Gulf Labor practices art ecologically—considering both the consequences from silencing dissent to the code of conduct of art institutions, and thus establishes a new sense of solidarity. Their advocacy is a contemporary institutional critique aiming at tangible and reachable goals. Institutions such as the Guggenheim shouldn’t ignore and suppress them (as it recently did by breaking off any negotiations on the museum side), but rather use this moment of vulnerability for a potential change and rethinking their role.

Finally, Gulf Labor is not afraid to enter exhibition spaces as an artist coalition. Their activism obviously cannot be curated, but their influence on programming can challenge biennales and museums, as with their appearance both inside and outside the Venice Biennale exhibition. Gulf Labor also inspired other artists’ advocacy groups, such as Checkpoint Helsinki, that mobilized the art community against erecting yet another Guggenheim in the Finnish capital.

Gulf Labor might be a small fish, but the fact that it attacks a shark like the Guggenheim shows their boldness, courage, and the size of their stakes. Thanks to them the politics of “as if nothing happened” won’t be possible any more. We all want to go on, but we cannot go on undisturbed.