Gallery: Saadiyat Island Workers’ Quarters Collectable

By Matt Greco & Greg Sholette

3-D Prints, printed label, plastic boxes: unlimited edition.

The Workers Quarters Collectable was “shop-dropped” at the Guggenheim Museum gift shop in New York. The artists stocked the shelf with multiple copies of this convincing-looking keepsake to help visitors remember their trip to the Guggenheim.
 
A contribution to Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks, a one year campaign starting in October 2013. Artists, writers, and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, a text, or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi.
 
Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).

Read more and see more art from this exhibit.