Paper short abstract:

Since a few years there has been a remarkable development in both the local heritage industry and the contemporary art world in the Arab Gulf. The proposed paper looks at the relationship between the two in the United Arab Emirates to understand how cultural differences are negotiated in a place shared by many different languages, ethnicities, and nationalities.

Paper long abstract:

The nation-states in the Arab Gulf, and the United Arab Emirates specifically have focused intensively in their ongoing nation-building projects on the idea of local tangible and intangible heritages. Public policies by the state feature a national identity concept that caters exclusively to Emiratis. In a country that is internally divided and contested by differences of ethnicity, class, citizenship and gender, and in which more than ¾ of the population are not citizens, questions of belonging are omnipresent. Interestingly, the contemporary art world in the UAE has emerged as one of the main critics and negotiators to deal with these dialectics. This paper will thus investigate some of the arenas in which negotiations of identity take effect in the art world.

It will focus specifically on the big art fairs taking place in the UAE and how they actively construct discourses that either navigate around, or also feed into the pre-dominating narratives of nationalism disseminated by the state. The philosophical background to this ethnographic investigation lies in asking about the role that the arts take in negotiating identities, and its role in creating or disrupting the differences between people encountered.