There is a boom in museum construction in the Arabian Peninsula, with both national and pan-regional museums heralded as universal. Mainstream media and academic discourse have construed the import of global museum brands such as the Guggenheim or the Louvre into the Gulf region as a means towards facilitating pluralism and cultivating cosmopolitan citizenship in a post 9/11 era. Recent scholarship on the growth of museums considers them as an imported Eurocentric form that correlates with state interests in endorsing a national consciousness and a civic education.
Much of this work, however, neglects the specific ways through which collection and display create discursive spaces that become visible through the demarcation and policing of boundaries. These boundaries delineate the grounding by which the categorization and presentation of objects and sites manifest the museum in order to produce specific forms of visibility. This panel considers how material forms are arranged into spatial narratives that mediate the public presence of historically and culturally specific modes of governance and sovereignty. Moving beyond the symbolic, this panel explores how museums as active historicizing processes, embed material forms in ways that engender new possibilities in the domains of citizenship, religion and humanity. It examines the ways in which potential conflicts may be subsumed through the taming of difference. This would include, by way of example, the ways in which the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar draws connections between religion and art to produce a certain conceptualization of Islamic religiosity or the modes through which museums are organized to generate new modes of self-reflections in emerging national forums such as the Zayed National Museum, Abu Dhabi or the National Museum, Muscat.
However, the very efforts in which these object fields come to be arranged also involves gaps that make way for the recognition of contestations at their core. These may compel us to rethink the dominant mechanisms of cultural representation, producing differences that may become the site of new political and ethical struggles. Papers are sought that examine how material forms configure public displays to produce historical sensibilities that consolidate or destabilize authoritative ways of living and knowing in the Gulf region. Pertinent topics include: politics of museum representation, modes of constructing material histories and their consequences, intersections between the spatial, social and political dimensions of heritage production, process of making distinctive in/visible communal boundaries, social relationships, as well as the place of Islam.
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Dr. Amal Sachedina
Since its inception as a nation state from 1970, Oman’s expanding heritage industry – exemplified by the boom in museums, exhibitions, cultural festivals and the restoration of more than a hundred forts, castles and citadels saturate the landscape and become increasingly ubiquitous as part of a public and visual memorialization of the past. The Ibadi sectarian tradition that predominated the interior for more than a thousand years is still in evidence in the great fortresses, watchtowers, mosques and walled residential quarters that dot the landscape. However, The Omani past, once articulated through references to the Quran, stories about the Prophet and his companions, the Ibadi imams and tribal lore was transformed with the emergence of new public history institutions from 1970 onwards when nation state building began. Through documentary and ethnographic research, of one particular fortress, the Nizwa fort, my paper argues that national heritage, as a form of history making, was established through the forceful elimination of Ibadi sharī’a as a legal tradition as well as a historically grounded way of life. The Nizwa fort, once the administrative and juridical centre of the Imamate (1913-1958) sanctioned a past that was primarily moral in nature, oriented towards God and salvation and grounded in Ibadi doctrine and practice. The function of history held that the heterogeneity of every-day life’s interactions and relationships facilitated by objects and texts could be assessed on the basis of past authoritative and exemplary forms of justice and morality, as embodied by the lives of virtuous forbears such as former Imams as well as the Prophet and his companions. Cleaving through the temporal assumptions of sharī’a time, heritage and conservation practices of the secular modern state, reconfigure Ibadi religiosity through adopting a temporal engagement with a past that entails a changing teleological future rather than one continuous with an exemplary history. Through institutionally circulating circuits of education, aesthetics and ethics, the national heritage project that was undertaken in modern Oman has treated history and Islam as seemingly separate, erasing any formal awareness of the socio-political and ethical relationships that once characterized Ibadi Imamate rule (1913-1958) in the region. In the process, the discursive practices of a museal mode of representation reconfigure religion through a temporal rationale that entails a progress-oriented future, rather than one drawing upon an exemplary history.
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Prof. Elizabeth Derderian
This presentation examines practices and mechanisms of policing citizenship categories in Emirati contemporary arts exhibitions as well as the politics of temporal depth and simultaneity. In addition to ethnographic interviews with artists, audiences, and arts professionals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this paper analyzes key recent Emirati art exhibitions including the Emirati Expressions exhibitions series (2009, 2011, 2013, 2015), held biannually on Saadiyat Island in the UAE capital city; the Farjam Foundation’s “1971: Contemporary Art from the UAE,” a private collection shown in Dubai; and the Sharjah Art Foundation’s 2015 biennial exhibition “1980 – Today: Exhibitions in the United Arab Emirates.” First, this paper considers practices of inclusion and exclusion, in particular the defining of citizenship categories, in exhibitionary practice in the UAE. It explores the mechanisms through which differences in citizenship categories are produced, exploited or obviated; for example, the necessity of providing documentation of citizenship as a routine procedure for an artist’s acceptance into exhibitions, or the choices made in advertising format or language that render exhibitions (in)accessible to particular demographic populations and age groups. These distinguishing practices narrow whose art counts as authentically Emirati and simultaneously delineate a desired audience.
Secondly, it interrogates the ways in which artists and art professionals understand the role and importance of temporality. This presentation discusses the ways in which interlocutors at times deny the existence of historical arts production in the UAE to highlight the novelty of younger artists, or conversely showcase that older generation to deny claims that art and museums are not indigenous to the UAE and that the country has no tradition of arts practice. It analyzes how various arts organizations endeavor to showcase and produce a lengthy and established “organic” local production, forging a genealogy of artistic practice to counter international media critiques that art is not indigenous to the region. Thus in the UAE, the question of which artists are permitted to represent the nation in key public exhibitions is deeply political, and reproduces mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion based on age and national origin.
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Dr. Sarina Wakefield
This paper will examine the development of the planned cultural institutions on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi. It will focus on analysing the development of the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museums within the theoretical framework of hybridity. By doing so this paper raises questions about the role of heritage in relation to globalisation, but also about how relevant those traditional models of heritage and nation building (which were largely developed through the exploration of processes which had occurred during nineteenth and twentieth centuries in western, industrializing and post-industrializing contexts) are in understanding the role of heritage in the Gulf. This paper will draw on the authors doctoral research in Abu Dhabi, which used rapid ethnographic assessment processes model that incorporated: interviews, observations, surveys, and documentary analysis.
The paper will challenge the idea that museums and cultural institutions are dominated and demarcated by national borders and identities. Instead it will seek to explore the way in which the museum developments on Saadiyat Island speak to cross cultural identity development, and in particular contemporary cosmopolitan identities (Wakefield 2013, 2014). It will do so by first providing a discussion of hybridity as a concept and how its usefulness for understanding contemporary heritage developments in Abu Dhabi. It will then explore how the development of the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi are part of a ‘hybrid process’ of developing heritage in Abu Dhabi, which are being used to develop new museums and cultural institutions. Next the paper will explore how these hybrid processes are connected to issues of cross-cultural translation, identity (local, national and global) and representation. Particular focus will be paid to the political and power dynamics that emerge from the co-production of contemporary new museums in the United Arab Emirates. Ultimately this paper serves to explore how the creation of cross-border heritage, through the development of new museums on Saadiyat Island serves various economic, political and social aims that affect how heritage is created and presented in new socio-cultural contexts. In doing so it contributes to the interdisciplinary field of critical heritage studies and our understanding of contemporary heritage developments in the Gulf.
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Thomas Fibiger
This presentation addresses the difficult question of differences within the Islamic communities in the Gulf, and how this is addressed in museums. What is the proper place of religion in Gulf museums? While the image of the global has led many museums to a general and broad approach to society and in particular religion, there is a backdrop of local religious identities which are more difficult to engage with in the museums. Based on extensive ethnographic field work since 2003, the presentation takes Bahrain as the main example, where the National Museum focuses on collective narrative of Islamic traditions, while the Bahraini society is repeatedly and these years increasingly split over sectarian issues with a Sunni regime ruling over a largely Shia population. Thus, while Islam as a category is duly represented in the museum, there is no mentioning of what kind of Islam, and which Muslims, this includes or excludes, nor of the varieties of Islam that are otherwise hard to neglect in contemporary Bahraini society. In the wake of the revolts in the Arab world since 2011, these questions have become even more pertinent. I will point to the paradox that the National Museum works towards inclusion, by giving a broad and national narrative of Islam rather than a divisive one, but in doing so come to exclude narratives that really matter to people, which are specific stories for particular groups. The presentation will in this way employ Talal Asad’s critical assessment of the place of religion in modern societies and address this in a museum context. This place of religion is not least difficult in the global cosmopolitanism that Gulf museums aspire to form part of, and the presentation therefore intends to serve as a discussion of the challenges of the museums in finding a proper place for religion, in particular in these years of increasing sectarian conflicts.
