I wrote about Dubai’s Museum of Future Government, the artist collective GCC, and piratical, appropriative modes of production in the Spring 2015 issue of ArteEast, available to read online here.
We could ask the same questions of the GCC collective. In the tradition of Bidoun, is their work only legible from a vantage point of several thousand kilometers—and a several hundred years of imperialist legacy—away, from New York, Morschach, Berlin, London, Kassel, Beijing and not closer to home in Sharjah or Kuwait? Who is their work made for, and who are they ultimately working for, willingly or otherwise? Is it even possible to make work in and around the Gulf without being subject to the same appropriative, piratical dynamics that underwrites much of their practice, without being subsumed under a nation building juggernaut?