Vikram Divecha: Warehouse Project

Warehouse Project Vi kram Di v echa

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Wa r e h o u s e P r o j e c t Vikram Divecha E d i t e d b y Ta i r o n e B a s t i e n a n d V i k r a m D i v e c h a Contributors: V i k r a m D i v e c h a , Ta i r o n e B a s t i e n , A d a m C l i f t o n , Ke v i n J o n e s , D e b r a Le v i n e , M u r t a z a Va l i , a n d N e h a Vo r a A l s e r k a l P r o g r a m m i n g , D u b a i , UA E

Cover image courtesy Vikram Divecha.

All images Vikram Divecha except where noted.

INDEX

Introduction A D i s r u p t i o n i n Wa r e h o u s e 8 2 _ 0 4 TA I R O N E B A S T I E N Wa l l Te x t _ 1 2 Photo Essay_14 VIKRAM DIVECHA Wa r e h o u s e a s D u b a i ’s c u l t u r a l h e r i t a g e _ 3 8 NEHA VORA Hybrid Spaces, Arrested Flows, Stacked Forms: O n V i k r a m D i v e c h a ’s Wa r e h o u s e P r o j e c t _ 5 5 M U R TA Z A V A L I To w a r d a C o m m o n S a t i s f a c t i o n o f N e e d s : The Ongoing Situation of the Wa r e h o u s e P r o j e c t _ 6 7 DEBRA LEVINE Marketing Presentation: B oxe d B r a n d e d P l u s h To y s a s A r t _ 7 4 KEVIN JONES T h e N e x t Re a l l y G r e a t T h i n g . T h e F u t u r e a s Speculative Frontier_89 A DA M C L I F TO N T h a n k Yo u M r S u g i a r s o _ 1 0 5 VIKRAM DIVECHA

TA I R O N E B A S T I E N

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Introduction: A Disruption in Warehouse 82 One of the main aims of the Alserkal Programme is to examine and draw inspiration from Al Quoz, the neighbourhood in which we are located. Al Quoz is one of the few sites of production and industry in Dubai. Metal, wood and machine factories, trading companies, refineries, automotive dealers, and garages occupy most of the industrial zones.

Al Quoz is unique in Dubai for the sheer density and diversity of the industrials within it. It is a neighbourhood built for function rather than with an aim of constructing a “community”. Over the last decade, several galleries and cultural organisations, along with Alserkal Avenue, have taken root, adding a different category of business to the mix, one that relies on parallel, but not wholly separate, methods of making, trade and consumption.

In his widely shared treatise on the “open city,” sociologist Richard Sennett proposes an alternative paradigm to the “closed system” of urban planning that he argues pervades in existing and new markets. A closed system is characterised by an over-determination of cities via the application of ever more sophisticated technologies that make them cleaner, safer, more efficient and dynamic.

The creation of most new cities, Dubai included, is fuelled by such visions. But in doing so, such closed systems discourage hybridisation, chance encounters between communities and public participation in an urban imaginary. In contrast, Sennett argues for dissonance. Like Jane Jacob before him, he sees potential in incoherent but living streetscapes, spaces that encourage movement across boundaries, as well as incomplete and indeterminate spaces that citizens are free to share, interpret and make their own, as needed.

The first season of the Alserkal Programme used Sennett’s proposal for an “open city” as a matrix through which to comprehend the disjointed assembly of creative and industrial businesses in Al Quoz, It also served as a call to action, presenting

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a real-life challenge to create more opportunities for dissonance within our community to be seen, felt and heard. We invited six artists – Vikram Divecha, Mary Ellen Carroll, Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver, Oliver Herring, Mohammed Kazem, and Jessica Mein – to infiltrate the physical spaces of the neighbourhood, to cross boundaries between artistic and industrial communities, to bring alternative ideas and viewpoints to light, and to examine the essential incoherence of Al Quoz.

Vikram Divecha is part of an emerging generation of artists from Dubai who are not necessarily citizens of the UAE, but who have lived in the country for some time and use it as a base for their developing practice. Like many of this generation, Divecha is working - through the definition and mutable conditions specific, but by no means unique, to the Dubai community. The most striking aspect of his approach to art-making is his concern for what he terms “found processes”, or the prevailing systems by which we live, labour, and relate with one another in society. He takes his time to learn the intricacies of a given process and to develop a level of empathy and a mutual sense of trust with key individuals that operate within it. Then, from his vantage point, he proposes an elegant reworking of the process that intends to call into question the methods enacted within the system that seek to delimit, define and control individuals within it.

For his commissioned work, titled Warehouse Project, Divecha conducted months of research into the re-export industry in Dubai, getting to know the traders who operate warehouses between Jebel Ali and Al Quoz. Thousands of commodities worth billions of dollars transit through Dubai each year, connecting markets and linking buyers and sellers from Russia and Central Asia, to Africa and the Middle East. As he does, Divecha became deeply familiar with the industry at a micro level, zeroing in on the traders, managers, and stock handlers who stacked and moved the goods from one place to the next.

TA I R O N E B A S T I E N

INTRODUCTION

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Artist Vikram Divecha at Warehouse 82, Alserkal Avenue.

24 February 2016. Image credit: Tairone Bastien

TA I R O N E B A S T I E N

INTRODUCTION

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Divecha was given warehouse 82, a large warehouse located at the pedestrian entrance to Alserkal Avenue, for his commission, and he in turn bartered possession of that real estate with a general trading company based in Al Quoz seeking additional storage facilities. Warehouse 82 was handed over to a trading company named Atiq Liusie, to store thousands of boxes containing toys manufactured in Asia that are transiting through to other parts of the world. Atiq Liusie used the warehouse for four months, moving their goods in and out. In exchange, the trading company permitted the warehouse to remain open to an art-going public, and the flow of goods and other activities taking place within it to be exhibited in the context of art.

Within the frame of the Warehouse Project, warehouse 82 was both a warehouse and an arts space. Over the course of the project, thousands of dirhams worth of commercial goods entered and exited the warehouse, which meant the flow and arrangement of the stacked boxes changed every week, sometimes daily. For the traders and handlers, these were goods to be imported and exported as the market demands. For the artist and for others who would have seen the warehouse as one more art gallery on the Avenue, the stacks were interpreted as sculptures and their ever-shifting forms read as a kind of performance.

Warehouse Project does not rest on theoretical ideas. Divecha took the invitation of a commission and turned it into a real-world exchange of value.

By working with and through pedestrian processes, he was able to influence people on the edges of art’s precinct. More than that, he brought industrial activity to a corner of the neighbourhood designated for contemporary art. With galleries opening on all sides, the dissonance caused by the physical activity and presence of Warehouse Project was imperative and deserves reflection.

Unlike past works, such as Negative Heaps (of Designated Waste) and Shaping Resistance, both

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Returning to Sennett’s treatise as a lens through which to read Warehouse Project, in the context of the commissioning series, we value the work’s ability to drive unexpected encounters and support competing ideas. Whereas most people operate in enclaves surrounded by like-minded individuals, moving in and out, but always tethered to the known, Warehouse Project presents a space that is less compartmentalised, bringing to light the essential discord of our environment. In so doing, this work helps us imagine Al Quoz as a neighbourhood permeated by difference. And by documenting Warehouse Project in this book, we again hope to encase a multitude of distinct voices, and thereby continue the work’s capacity to disrupt.

INTRODUCTION

Warehouse Project Talks was a series of presentations that took place inside warehouse 82 in the first six weeks of the project. Dissonance was present here again, as the series brought into relief the varied fascinations and interpretations of art, real estate and commodities. Each of the speakers engaged the warehouse and its goods on his or her own terms, from an art historical exegesis that proposed comparisons to Pop Art and Minimalism, to a performed marketing presentation on the presupposed brand values of the entities involved. From these different angles, all of which are documented in the present book, Warehouse Project appears like a palimpsest, a layering of professional interests and critical perspectives equally shaded yet evident.

TA I R O N E B A S T I E N

from 2015, for which Divecha invited labourers who normally work according to standardised structures to upset expectations through minor acts of self-expression, in Warehouse Project, Divecha did not invite creative expression in the trading business. Instead, he reflected back on the systems of art and invited professionals in that field to interpret the work. For scholars and others, the boxes were essentially unpacked, read not just as commodities, but also as “representations” of commodities, equally important, if not more valuable, for the ideas and references they generated.

14 MARCH – 11 JUNE, 2016

WAREHOUSE PROJECT

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WALL TEXT

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Warehouse Project | 2016 Wholesale goods, Warehouse 82 (3444 sq. ft.)

For Warehouse Project, Vikram Divecha has, as part and for the duration of his concept, bartered possession of real estate at Alserkal Avenue with a general trading company requiring storage facilities, without relinquishing the warehouse’s intended function as an art space. In exchange, the trader has allowed their goods and activities to be exhibited from 14 March – 11 June 2016.

Divecha facilitated the exchange by brokering an arrangement between Alserkal Avenue and the general trading company for up to a four-month period. The arrangement, in effect, diverts the flow of these commodities through the Warehouse Project, turning it into a spatial node in the global economy of capital circulation. While serving as a temporary storage space, the warehouse itself also transforms into a situation that conflates art, commerce and commodities. The site of exchange becomes one of intersection. The market replaces the artist and becomes a visible hand that sculpts the form and volume of stock. The situation reframes the towers of cartons as fluctuating sculptures, as a fax or phone call could quickly reconfigure them.

The situation is initiated when shipments of toys (Zippy, Hello Kitty, Little Tikes, i-Que Intelligent Robot, etc.), arrive from China. At unpredictable times these goods, each with their own stockkeeping unit (SKU), will move through various nodes, to be distributed across the GCC. Before they are delivered to their ultimate destination, their brief stay at Warehouse Project reveals their alternative potential - to step out as art.

Located within two circuits of reality, the goods are consumed by an art audience, whilst remaining concealed as standardised units. This instantly accrued surplus ‘art’ value is subtracted the moment they are pushed further to feed another consumption cycle.

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• As part of the Warehouse Project Atiq Liusie General Trading is free to move goods in and out at anytime during the above stated period Warehouse Project was made possible with support from: Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, Vilma Jurkute, Aquamarina Adonopoulou, Luay Al Derazi, Feras Attawna, Victoria Lelandais, Fiza Akram, Sayed Makhdoom, Stephen Kigoye and Alserkal Avenue team. Alywin Liusie, Laurent Lapietra, Sanju Rajan, Mohamad Latif and Atiq Liusie General Trading team. Tairone Bastien, Debra Levine, Murtaza Vali, Kevin Jones, Neha Vora, Gayatri Gopinath, and Shaina Anand. The Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, Tashkeel and Campus Art Dubai. Pradeep Kumar, Jaisurya Kurup, Haresh Chugani (Molden Trading), Ammar Sorathia (Pronto Trading), Shankar Bhagchandani (Al Taqdeer Al Rafia), Nadeem Mukadam (M.H. Enterprises), Ajay Krishnan (Consolidated Shipping Group), Suku Sudhakaran (VAG shipping), Baber Jahangir (Fakhruddin Trading), Bose Cherian (Bismi Trading) • All goods in this warehouse are the property of Atiq Liusie General Trading L.L.C. • Visitors are advised not to lean on or push the cartons.

WALL TEXT

• Warehouse 82 has been made available to Atiq Liusie General Trading from 24 February to 26 June, 2016

VIKRAM DIVECHA

The situation is isomorphic. Warehouse 82, set among vibrant galleries in Dubai, exhibits itself as one multivalent unit among many others. Alserkal Avenue acts as the mechanism of that transformation. Real estate, art and commodities become equivalent containers in this neighbourhood, as capital makes no distinction between the modifiers ‘cultural’ and ‘economic’. We are surrounded by a broader assortment of SKUs, each one registering the Avenue’s own transition from industrial to cultural. As spectators, moving in and out, we participate in this situation, witnessing the performance of capital.

VIKRAM DIVECHA

P H OTO E S S AY

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Murshid Bazaar, Deira. Research Image

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Office of Sanju Rajan, Logistics Manager at Atiq Liusie Al Quoz Industrial Area #3, Street 22a.

Research Image

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Sanju Rajan from Atiq Liusie taking possession of Warehouse 82, and goods being moved in.

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Manual carton stacking systems in Warehouse 82

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Warehouse Project, 2016 Wholesale goods, Warehouse 82 (3444 sq. ft.)

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Email invite designed and sent

by Atiq Liusie to their partners.

Courtesy of Atiq Liusie

Atiq Liusie trader Laurent Lapietra in the background and artist Vikram Divecha in the foreground.

Image credit: Arman Farahmand-Razavi

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CCTV stills, March – June

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CCTV stills, March – June

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Excel list of goods at Warehouse Project in March

Details of stacked cartons

SR

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

REF BE2023 LM669-011 LKDH0575 1306 533153E4C 638466 536239 623400MP 632624M 536222 536178 536888E4C 05486 535737 638541 56324 90116 36801 36809 OBDH0738 638077M 635908M 627354E4 450B10060 172083E13 440W00060 400G00060 172410E3 426310060 172472E3 479A00060 628566E3 612060E5 424300072 614798E5 008-83 77042 77037 11041 40004 74204

Stocks at Alserkal Warehous

90114 56325 638480 822036

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION P.JOY GLAMGLAM VANITY SET B/O P.JOY GLAMGLAM PRINCESS BEAUTY HAIR DRESSER P.JOY YUMYUM MY KITCHEN LIEZEL B/O P.JOY BABY CAYLA PLAYING W FRIEND B/O 30CM LALALOOPSY MINI SEW SWEET HOUSE S15 LITTLE TIKES OCEAN ADVENTURE COURSE B/O F15 LALALOOPSY SUPER SILLY PARTY MITTENS FLUFF F15 LITTLE TIKES ACT.GARDN 2IN1 PUSH N PLAY TURTLE S12 LITTLE TIKES ACTIVITY GARDEN REFRESH B/O 6-36m F14 LALALOOPSY SUPER SILLY PARTY CRUMBS SUGAR F15 LALALOOPSY DOLL 13" CORE FLUFFY POUNCY PAWS F15 LALALOOPSY DOLL 13" STRINGS PICK N STRUM F15 TEKNO ROBOTIC SCOOBY DOO B/O LALALOOPSY BABIES SURPRISE POTTY DOLL F15 LITTLE TIKES TIRE TWISTER B/O F15 I-QUE INTELLIGENT ROBOT B/O HELLO KITTY BEANIE BABIES PINK MEDIUM 11IN BEANIE BOOS GIRAFFE SAFARI LARGE 16IN BEANIE BOOS TURTLE ZIPPY GREEN LARGE 16IN HELLO KITTY BEANIE BABIES BALLERINA MEDIUM P.JOY BEACH SANDTABLE SET MY FRIEND FREDDY B/O LITTLE TIKES SCOOTEROO (SCOOT/LEAF) S15 LITTLE TIKES SEAL BALL TOSS B/O F15 LITTLE TIKES 5IN1 ADJUSTABLE GYM B/O S15 BABYBORN INTERACTIVE H. BIRTHDAY DOLL 43CM 3+ S16 LITTLE TIKES TRIKE 4IN1 BASIC UNISEX PRIMARY COLOR LITTLE TIKES IN-OUT COOKNGRILL C15 POL LITTLE TIKES CLASSIC CASTLE C15 POLAND LITTLE TIKES 8IN1 PLAYGRND C15 POLAND LITTLE TIKES ROCKING HORSE PINK C15 POL LITTLE TIKES FIRST SLIDE PINK C15 POLAND LITTLE TIKES LARGE SLIDE-SUNSHNE C15 POL LITTLE TIKES GIANT SLIDRAINBW C15 POLAND LITTLE TIKES JUNIOR PICNIC TABLE C15 POL LITTLE TIKES ANCHOR PIRTESHIP C15 POLAND LITTLE TIKES COZY COUPE-CLASSIC C15 POL LITTLE TIKES MINI CYCLE C15 POLAND LITTLE TIKES COZY COUPE-PRINCESS C15 POL P.JOY YUMYUM TOLOSA KITCHEN PRO 69PCS SSONIC KEYBOARD 49K 77042 B/O SSONIC KEYBOARD 37K+MIC 77037 B/O SSONIC MY FIRST KEYBOARD W MIC B/O SSONIC KEYBOARD 37K GIRLZ +MIC B/O FLYING FRIENDS - BUZZ LIGHTYEAR 14 B/O

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Export documents.

Courtesy of Atiq Liusie

22 MARCH – 19 APRIL 2016

WA R E H O U S E P R O J E C T TA L K S

36 Warehouse Project Talks were presented by Alserkal Programming, in support of the Warehouse Project by Vikram Divecha. The talks developed from conversations with various thinkers, scholars and writers with whom the artist engaged in the development of the situation.

Some texts and presentations have been revised to suit the printed format.

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NEHA VORA

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Warehouse as Dubai’s cultural heritage It’s hard to believe that ten years ago today I was a graduate student just a couple of months into fieldwork here in Dubai – going to the field being a rite of passage to the coveted PhD in anthropology. In March 2006, I had just begun to get my bearings and understand to some degree how to navigate the different neighbourhoods of the city and who inhabited them, and I was slowly incorporating myself into the ebbs and flows of the Dubai Creek neighbourhoods where I was living and conducting research. I was naturalising the sensorium of old Dubai – its smells, sounds, sights, languages, forms of dress and comportment, and the overall rhythm of everyday life, as I established my own routines and my sense of residency.

Over the years, as I have visited Dubai for work and for leisure, the city has in many ways become unrecognisable, something I’m sure many of you have experienced after returning, sometimes even from as little as a month or two away, or have heard from friends and family who come to visit repeatedly. But in other ways, this city remains to me deeply familiar even as it is constantly shifting in its demographics, built environments, and cultural landscapes. Being asked to reflect on my early research and the book that resulted from it, along with my newer scholarship, seems particularly fitting in this venue, one that marks for me both the unrecognisable and the deeply familiar aspects of Dubai. While this audience and this venue are well outside of my comfort zone as an American academic who is used to speaking in university lecture halls and classrooms, the materiality of Vikram’s Warehouse Project and the human relationships it evokes resonate with my feelings of home and belonging in Dubai, a city that is not my home and yet one I claim from time to time.

The warehouse we are in makes visible the ethnographic landscape of trade and traders, their networks of belonging in the city, and

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older, non-Eurocentric forms of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms, which I have explored in my academic work and will focus on to some extent today. But even more importantly, it is also the point of transfer between different forms of value and urban life: as goods come into the city, are distributed and held in various locations, and then sent elsewhere, they take on different meaning and accumulate more than just monetary profit. In the case of this particular warehouse, the goods have taken on artistic value and cultural capital, and in the process engaged and produced a new web of sociality. This space, one of goods temporarily suspended while in transit; and the artist, who has to network and negotiate around the city in order to allow us to see this situation; and you, the majority of whom are considered to be transitory no matter how long you have been here; as well as myself, whose lifework involves transiting through the Gulf this is what I am calling Dubai’s cultural heritage.

But what does it mean for a scholar of Dubai’s trade – one who herself is moving in and out of the city as a means of accumulating forms of capital - to participate in this circulation? Like all new arrivals,

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Murshid Bazaar, Deira

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Signage at trading store, Deira

I came to Dubai with my own baggage and with a pre-conceived sense of what I would find here, but probably not the one that most people arrive with, which I will try to unpack over the course of this talk. I want to not only reflect on the ethnographic aspects of the warehouse today but also start to think about, as I have been in my newer work, the academic, creative, artistic, and other unexamined or unanticipated nodes of the mercantile supply chains that anchor Dubai, through a critical reexamination of my movement as a scholar through the city during field research.

So let’s go back to 2006, or slightly before, when I was beginning to formulate a research project around Indians in Dubai. I often get asked the question, why Dubai? At the time, and to some extent even today, scholars of the Middle East reproduced rather crass stereotypes when I told them of my interest in studying Dubai, of Khaleejis as bumpkins who had just come into wealth and didn’t know what to do with it. The Gulf was a place without culture, so what was there to study? These stereotypes are unfortunately quite common among non-Gulf Arab communities, as my colleague Ahmed Kanna and I are currently exploring in a joint paper about conducting fieldwork as in-between subjects in American academe and in the Gulf – I draw from this newer

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When South Asians were represented, they were usually folded into a growing number of sensationalised media representations of Dubai as a post-modern city rapidly rising out of the desert. This city was exceptionalised through its juxtaposition with the seemingly timeless Emirati culture that I just discussed, as well as through expose pieces that revealed the labour exploitation – what some even called “modern day slavery” – undergirding Dubai’s shiny skyscrapers and tourist spectacles. It was only here, in the millennial capitalism of Dubai’s urban boom, that the Indian presence seemed to exist, not as part of the human fabric of society, but rather as a spectre

W A R E H O U S E A S D U B A I ’ S C U LT U R A L H E R I T A G E

In 2006, very few scholars were discussing the actual cities of the Gulf and the varied people who lived in them outside of these two frameworks – nouveau riche “tribes with flags” or timeless Arabian nights. This contrasted starkly with what I knew about the region, and especially its Indian diaspora, through friends and family, and through Indian cultural productions. The Gulf, and especially Dubai, as I discuss in my book Impossible Citizens, was part of my transnational Indian imaginary while I was growing up in the States. Given the sheer number of Indians and other South Asians in the city, I found their absence not only from academic scholarship, but also travel guides and anything else that I could find in the lead-up to my research, glaring.

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work in parts of today’s talk. But to hear these stereotypes reproduced by esteemed scholars of the Middle East was rather appalling. On top of that, what little anthropological research that did exist on the Gulf could mostly be categorised as what Paul Dresch has called “coffeepots and camels” – romanticised narratives of timeless Bedouins that rehearsed not only British colonial representations but also Emirati state investments in producing a particular kind of national identity.

Walk into any bookstore or site of heritage production in the Gulf and you will find versions of this kind of representation.

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of globalisation’s worst excesses, voiceless and reduced to bare life.

This was not the Indian version of Dubai that I had grown up with. Where were those people, the traders and merchants who were part of Dubai’s history, the middle-classes who were part of my own and practically everyone else’s extended family, the consumers who travelled to Dubai from India to purchase gold and electronics, and the families whose kids, like me, were born and raised outside of a homeland they were taught to feel more connection to than the one they occupied?

I wanted to know more about the everyday lives of Indians – the largest population of this city – and I was suspicious of the sensationalised ways that Dubai was being presented in international media venues and, increasingly, in scholarship on urbanism and globalisation.

What bothered me about the descriptions of Dubai, which have since been recycled to describe Doha and Abu Dhabi, was that they reproduced Orientalist tropes and diminished the ways that labour exploitation and other practices that occur here are part of global capitalism – sure, the demographics of this place might be unique, and international branding efforts by multinationals and parastatals have championed Dubai as oneof-a-kind and over-the-top in ways that push us to think of it as exceptional – but in fact what I saw in terms of the effects of the kafala system in the Gulf was not much different than what I have seen in the US, from the economic reliance on demonised undocumented Mexican labourers to the temporary visa regimes and ancillary ethnic enterprises that exploit and racialise highly-skilled Indian tech workers.

Dubai as a spectacle also did not leave room for what anthropologists do, which is study the mundane aspects of people’s daily lives in order to understand broader cultural meanings and social structures, community and identity formations, and connections to larger transnational processes.

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These representations, as they moved further into academic scholarship, also reduced non-citizen lives to the economic, erasing the possibility of rich social networks, forms of belonging, or intimacy from the lives of foreign residents, especially labourers, in effect dehumanising them once more.

The focus on kafala as exploitation also erased the complicity of non-citizens themselves in migration processes and the everyday management of labour.

One of the main findings of my field research was that Indians are actually most often exploited by co-ethnics, who capitalise on familiarity and existing networks to consolidate their hold over certain industries, like gold and electronics.

In contrast to the existing media and academic understandings of Dubai at the time, I was interested in constituting my “field� through the narratives and traces of Indian-ness that I found in histories of the Indian Ocean, which explored the role of Indians in British colonialism in the region, as well as through my own anecdotal yet rather ubiquitous evidence that Dubai played a significant part in global Indian consciousness. I decided therefore to focus my dissertation on older trade diasporas, in order to centralise the historical and

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Sample goods at Pronto Trading, Deira

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contemporary ways that Indians were inextricably part of the city; my entry into this project seemed to naturally point me to gold merchants and their memories of pre-oil Dubai. Therefore, every morning for the first few months of fieldwork, I walked from my apartment, which was on the edge of Dubai’s crowded Bur Dubai neighbourhood, to the Dubai Creek, where I took an abra into Deira’s Gold Souk area. Here I would begin field research for the day, watching wholesale and retail trade, interviewing gold merchants and shop workers, and noting consumption patterns. As a younger Indian diasporic woman – often the only non-customer female present in the souks – I was treated by merchants in a paternalistic way, one that was uncomfortable but also afforded me access that others might not have been able to achieve. Let me reflect here on one of my field moments, when I finally met with a gold bullion trader named Mr Zaveri, who, according to several of my interviewees, was the inspiration for a character in Robin Moore’s novel Dubai, which is about gold smuggling in the emirate in the 1970s.

It’s supposedly banned here, but my guess is it’s hard to find because it is excruciatingly bad and out of print.

I was nervous to finally meet Mr Zaveri after all I had heard of him. Expecting a glitzy office in a tall building, I was surprised when I found Mr Zaveri’s small office door wedged between a shop selling shawls and a falafel joint on a street that was well-removed from the main thoroughfares of Deira’s gold souk. An employee buzzed me in and escorted me upstairs in a cage elevator to Mr Zaveri’s office, which was decorated with 1960s metal office furniture, dirty white linoleum tiles, and a Hindu deity calendar on one of the walls next to a real-time digital display of commodity prices. About a dozen men were busy answering phone calls about the day’s gold rates. Mr Zaveri, an unassuming man in a wrinkled short sleeve shirt who appeared to be in his late sixties, was sitting among his employees, himself answering

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Mr Zaveri had diversified away from jewellery in the past decade and was also participating in a new free-zone project called the Dubai MultiCommodities Center. He, like other gold merchants I spoke to, was proud of what he had accomplished in his time in Dubai while simultaneously indexing the need for propriety in speaking about smuggling and other quasi-legal dealings. The space occupied by Indian merchants in Dubai as risktaking entrepreneurs on the edge of legality was

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Mr Zaveri’s aura of secrecy was about appearing important, I came to believe over the course of several conversations, because the information he shared did not diverge significantly from what I learned from other merchants: that personal gold sales were illegal in India until the 1990s so people hired wooden dhows to smuggle gold past the Indian authorities; that guns were necessary to arm boats “just in case”; and that there are probably “kilos and kilos” of gold at the bottom of the Indian Ocean because of all the times they had to dump it to avoid being caught. Mr Zaveri then proceeded to tell me that today, as a bullion trader and money changer, he physically moves between seven to eight million dollars a day through his office. To prove his success, as well as to dazzle me - and I undoubtedly was dazzled, he called one of his employees into the office, and we all went up to a vault on the floor above stacked with ten tola and kilo bars of pure gold and trash bags full of currency, both dollars and dirhams.

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the phone from time to time while also texting on his mobile. He ushered me into his private office, offered me tea, and then proceeded to grill me about my background – Who are my parents? What do they do? Am I married? Am I a practicing Hindu?

After apparently ascertaining that I was not a reporter, but still suspect because I was pursuing a useless degree in anthropology, he told me that he was about to share very sensitive information and that he has to be careful because the history of gold in Dubai “has not always been that savoury”.

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used in their narratives as a mode of belonging: they felt that it was through a unique relationship between India and Dubai, which they singlehandedly created, that Dubai is on the map at all.

The successes of contemporary Dubai in terms of commerce and development had as their basis this open secret of smuggling, the sharing of which produced a sense of community among Indian businessmen and a sense of belonging historically to the Emirate.

We can see in this one ethnographic vignette how trade histories, and the neighbourhoods in which trade takes place, are rich parts of Dubai’s cultural heritage, and how trade provided Indians with ways of belonging despite lack of access to formal citizenship. Like Mr Zaveri, merchants claimed over and over that they “made” the city, and in many ways they were right.

This example also shows us how gold – a material that perhaps comes closest to being a pure store of economic value, was much more than economic for these men: it was infused with memory, it produced social relationships, it was gendered in its production and consumption, it was tied to ethno-national identity, and it adapted to spatial and legal changes in the city. Vikram’s warehouse situation, in this sense, could be understood as another iteration of how material goods are cultural, creating rootedness and social relationships in Dubai through their transit, and therefore not simply neutral containers for soft toys that will accumulate monetary value as they are imported and then resold. But I want to add another layer to this story, one that I have been unpacking over the last decade through my work in the Gulf, first among Indian communities in Dubai, and more recently within American institutions of higher education in Qatar. It is a layer that implicates the anthropologist, the artist, the journalist, the observer, and the audience, i.e. all of us, in the networks and processes we tend to relate to as outsiders.

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During my early field research months in 2006, after meetings like the one I had with Mr Zaveri, I would take the abra back to Bur Dubai in the early afternoon and walk home to my apartment, usually stopping along the way to buy groceries from Spinney’s or lingering in the Burjuman shopping mall to get out of the heat, or stopping at an Internet café to check emails and write fieldnotes. My early ethnographic map did not extend into these Western expatriate “edges” that I traversed and occupied as part of my daily life, and my fieldnotes do not include much detail about these places and activities. I almost solely focused on what I then thought to be the “authentic” parts of Dubai, and I was increasingly full of concerns about what I was not finding in them. My research among gold merchants was particularly frustrating: after a while, their narratives felt too scripted, and I was having trouble finding enough meaning in them to move forward with a robust project.

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Vikram’s project here might be readily legible as exposing us to the performances and practices of trade and as interrupting the supply chain at a critical moment for observation and aesthetic appreciation; but the process of turning this warehouse that became an art space back into a literal warehouse for goods storage required a whole range of negotiations and legal maneuverings, as well as expenditures, that highlight not only conflicts over the meaning of urban space and who belongs to it, but also the new forms of sociality and value that emerge when Culture with a capital c meets culture in the lowercase. As bodies that are transitory (or not), we can never inhabit space without impacting it in some way. And for many of us, this is a source of dissonance, given the rigid ideas that we have naturalised about Dubai’s people and how they map on to certain places, class and race categories, and levels of social mobility and cosmopolitanism. Before I turn fully to what this means for the academic and the artist, let me return to my field in 2006, because I told you about arrivals, but not about departures.

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What I didn’t have the capacity to explore at the time was how much I just didn’t like many of the people I encountered in early fieldwork, and how unhappy I was living in Dubai. I was radically alone for the first time in my life; living in a city where everyone was working and creating their social networks through their jobs, I found I had too much time and no one to share it with. I also found walking into the mostlymale spaces of the souks to take a daily toll, as did the way that gender and age differences played out in my conversations with merchants – they were older, very wealthy, openly made inappropriate comments about my appearance, and in retrospect, regularly employed a paternalistic form of sexual harassment. The very things that provided me with the access that I had to these “big men” – my age, my South Asian-ness, and my gender – were also what made me hate fieldwork.

My embodied awareness of being a woman in mostly male space extended into my encounters with the service workers, taxi drivers, and other working-class South Asian men I interacted with regularly. However, in these encounters, my middle-class and Western status, as well as the fact that I was usually engaging them as a customer, meant that their precarity – classed, raced, and passport-based – came into further relief when having to interact with women in a country where discourses of women’s protection are used to police “bachelor” mobility and access to space. I hated these encounters because they required, on both of our parts, a very controlled and uncomfortable performativity, one that was laden with hetero-sexual tension. Meanwhile, I also felt closer to my “Indian-ness” than I ever had in my life, and I began to practice the consumer citizenship that I describe in my book – I adopted a field uniform of kurta and jeans, ate in Indian restaurants, watched Bollywood movies, shopped at South Asian grocery stores, and practised my rapidly-improving Hindi as often as I could. For the first time in my life, I could go days without thinking about my brown skin, a racial comfort that,

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At first I understood my discomfort in old Dubai as a glaring reminder of how being American made me more disconnected from my “culture” than my interlocutors were. This sense of not belonging enough prevented me from criticising the classed and gendered valences of Indian diasporic community formations in Dubai, and the erasures and violences they enacted. The celebratory modes of identity and diaspora that I had come to internalise (even as I critiqued essentialism) through my academic trajectory did not allow me to see these things right away. Also, I was surprisingly ashamed of being a cultural fraud – someone who looked Indian but was not Indian enough to be able to cope in the South Asian parts of the city. I was read, for example, as an NRI by most service workers and cab drivers, as well as by elite merchants, before I was even able to showcase my miserable but improving Hindi pronunciation. Thus, even though there were aspects of deep comfort that these neighbourhoods and people provided,

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A couple months into fieldwork, I began to slip in my daily routine, taking cabs out to the then still emergent “New Dubai” to wander around fancy shopping malls and hotels, spending money I didn’t have on sushi lunches or a glass of wine to sip while reading a novel in a nice hotel lobby.

In New Dubai I was a different person. I traded my kurta and jeans for sundresses and heels, I spoke English, and I consumed Western brands and products. As I guiltily noted one afternoon in my diary about a week into doing “nothing,” I felt comfortable there, but I couldn’t then articulate why I wanted to escape from the neighbourhoods that I considered my “home” spaces. I was so invested in ideas of authenticity around Indianness that I did not give appropriate attention to the ways that I felt out of place in old Dubai, and what feeling in place and out of place simultaneously could tell me about the city.

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having grown up in the United States, I found so unfamiliar that it bordered on painful.

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I spent the majority of my time in Dubai’s “Indian” spaces feeling inadequately Indian. It was only in reflecting back on what I then thought were my own failures to belong that I was able to see that my interlocutors were meaningfully different from me in ways that were just as important as how they were similar, and that without acknowledging those differences, my scholarship could not adequately represent their everyday lives.

Eventually, I decided not to look for historical traces of Indian-ness in the souks but to talk to a whole range of Indians, as well as other South Asians, about their lives in Dubai in relation to migration, work, family, and community. I needed to unpack my identity baggage in order to arrive at a new understanding of my field. This unpacking also required addressing my experiences in New Dubai as just as important ethnographically as my experiences in old Dubai. In my search for “roots” in old Dubai, I neglected my own Western complicity in the projects of Brand Dubai. I practiced my consumer citizenship not only as an Indian but also as a privileged Western subject who could enter into the luxury spaces of Dubai’s commercial and tourism boom without suspicion; and I could, even on a graduate student salary, consume some of the lifestyle and products offered in these spaces. In addition, shopping malls were feminine spaces, in contrast to the masculine street life of the Dubai Creek area. They provided, therefore, not only middle-class comfort, but also gendered safety. I came to see over my time in Dubai that I occupied different subject positions and embodied performances (sartorial, linguistic, gendered, raced, classed) as I moved through various parts of the city.

New Dubai, however, had its own set of discomforts and exclusions that I had to navigate.

As I and others have discussed in our writing, “expat” is a category that encompasses a number of nationalities, and is itself not easily bound, but it is also marked by white privilege, legacies

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My feelings of belonging and not belonging in Dubai could be read as derivative of a typical “bicultural” diasporic subjectivity. However, my understandings and experiences of both my Indian immigrant background and my American-ness were not the same in Dubai as they are in the United States, and required a re-imagining of how class, gender, race, and space informed my daily life as a foreign resident researcher, as well as the daily lives of my informants. Reflecting back on these experiences after a decade of research in Dubai and other cities in the Arabian Peninsula, I can see that I was unable to comprehend my relationship to my field site and its inhabitants within the existing

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I remember in the first few days of living in Dubai being in line at Spinney’s and listening to two white British men in front of me have a racist conversation about all of the reasons why Indians were bad co-workers: they either assumed I didn’t speak English or didn’t care. I’ve had a white professor at a university in the UAE ask me, with no qualms, whether there is something genetically different about Indians that makes the construction workers so “small.” And I have experienced going to American parties and having no one speak to me because I was not white, or perhaps presumed to be not American. In addition to racial discrimination, the shopping malls and hotels in New Dubai also produced anxieties around wealth, leading to what I always felt were false performances of fully belonging in those spaces as well.

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of white colonial pleasure/leisure, and Western habitus. The built environments of Dubai, along with ethno-racial understandings of who belongs in which spaces, enabled forms of segregation and self-segregation, allowing for illiberal comforts of white space that ironically could not be found as readily in Western countries. This means that racism and essentialised assumptions about different nationalities are normalised into the fabric of the city.

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vocabularies of geography, identity, power, and belonging on the region – vocabularies that I had naturalised prior to arrival, even as I was committed to pushing back against sensationalised understandings of Dubai’s capitalist spectacles.

I had also unconsciously packed prevalent ideas about identity in the United States as forms of baggage that academics – especially those who occupy minoritised positions – bring to the “field.”

And it is here that I want to turn to my newer research and conclude with the question I asked earlier about the role of the academic, and also the artist and audience, in the processes of trade and capitalist accumulation that we see before us.

My recent research has been within American university branch campuses in Doha: I am interested in the forms of citizenship, crossnational friendship, and belongings and exclusions that liberal education enables in the name of growing Qatar’s knowledge economy. For most academics in the US, these branch campuses in illiberal authoritarian contexts like the Gulf represent a crisis in American higher education, one they connect to increasing neo-liberal and corporate models of education, and a move away from the true liberal ethos of the university, which is to cultivate well-rounded citizens. Branch campuses in particular have become sites for a flurry of academic critique, and there has been a plethora of opinion pieces and scholarly production over the last several years opposing projects such as Yale Singapore, NYU Abu Dhabi, and the branch campuses where I have been conducting my fieldwork. Most of these critiques come from scholars who are not experts in these countries or regions, and in many cases have never even visited them. Very rarely do we see coverage in the US on these debates that actually ask faculty and students in branch campuses about their experiences and opinions.

What I have begun to see more clearly through this proliferation of scholarly texts “exposing” the

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In critiquing the Gulf, or even in researching it in what I hope are more ethical ways, academics and journalists accumulate forms of capital; they in fact draw from and therefore proliferate certain aspects of what they are claiming to criticize.

And in the process, they produce new socialities and participate in the production of Dubai’s identity – their tropes, for example, are recycled in the very built environments and advertising we see around the city, and are in conversation with state discourses and policies. It is an entrepreneurial activity to be an academic, as it is to be an artist, and yet art and the academy like to claim themselves as pure spaces for reflection on aesthetics and intellect. Vikram’s warehouse situation does not allow us to inhabit these pure spaces. It pulls us into the multiple layers of cultural meaning and social relationality that underpin this city, a city whose very identity is rooted in the transitory and shifting bodies and objects that continually remake it, and in the process both highlight deep stratification as well

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lack of “freedom” in countries like Qatar and the UAE, is that critique accumulates cultural capital within the academic metropole and is deemed inherently “good” (and oppositional), while the accumulation of monetary profit, for institutions or for the faculty and administrators that participate in projects of globalisation, is “bad,” and inherently antithetical to the project of liberal education.

The Marxist critique that underpins much of this work is thus deeply normative when claiming to be the opposite. Academics, after all, are also paid workers, and they have to engage in entrepreneurial activities and normative scholarly performances, like critique, in order to succeed professionally. This realisation has led me to revisit how the media and scholarly representations of Dubai and Doha that I find so troubling are not merely rehearsing Orientalist tropes but are in fact engaging in forms of capital accumulation that are not at all disconnected from the networks and processes my interlocutors participated in.

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as point to possibilities for new intimacies and identifications.

In my introductory anthropology course, I teach a classic text by Clifford Geertz called “thick description”. In it, he defines culture as “webs of meaning”, ones that we have spun and continue to spin through public engagements. Using the example of a wink, which can mean multiple things – a flirtation, an inside joke, something in my eye – he shows us that culture is not fixed in our minds but requires codes of mutual understanding.

But a wink can also be misinterpreted, and in that moment new meanings are made. Culture, therefore, has no essential core. It is like an onion, you peel one layer and you just find another. Or let me put it another way, reading from his own words: There is an Indian story – or at least I heard it is an Indian story – about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), "What did the turtle rest on?"

Another turtle. And that turtle? “Ah Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down”.

Turtles all the way down has become an anthropological catchphrase for the elusiveness of culture. I’ll end by suggesting that in the case of Dubai, perhaps it is not turtles all the way down, but rather boxes, stacked all the way up.

Like many of the most complex artworks throughout history, Vikram Divecha’s Warehouse Project appears deceptively straightforward on first encounter. Through an unmarked gate one enters a large warehouse space simply lit by bright white neon and filled with towers, some up to six meters high, of differently sized brown cardboard boxes. Individual stacks sit on wooden palettes arranged in a grid, creating narrow corridors that allow the visitor to meander between and around them, providing a closer look at the stored merchandise: “Made in China” toys by well known brands like Hello Kitty, Lalaloopsy, Little Tykes and Tyco. Smaller products are placed in front, boxed up in nondescript cartons with relevant trade and shipping information – trading company’s name, product name, stock-keeping unit (SKU), etc. – printed in simple black letters on their sides. On some of the larger goods in the back, brand name and designed packaging is clearly visible. The project enables an intimate visual and phenomenological encounter with and through the objects and spaces that constitute a sphere of economic activity that is characteristic of Dubai but that remains inaccessible to most of its residents.

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Illustration on carton stacked in Warehouse Project. Courtesy of Alserkal Avenue.

Stacked Forms, Arrested Flows, and Hybrid Spaces: On Vikram Divecha’s Warehouse Project

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Some of the most common responses to Warehouse Project through its four month run were: “But is it art?” or “What makes it art?”

These seemingly simple and most fundamental of questions are, however, the trickiest to answer.

One possible answer might be that something becomes art simply by being designated as such by an artist, a nominalist definition of art inaugurated by Marcel Duchamp’s famous readymades. Philosopher and critic Arthur Danto, provides another in “The Artworld,” his seminal 1964 essay: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” 1 Danto was compelled to write this text after encountering Andy Warhol’s notorious Brillo Soap Pads Box (1964), a profoundly enigmatic and confounding work that challenged the categories of art and the limits of taste at the time. Carefully applying house paint and silkscreen ink (in the wonderfully American palette of red, white and blue) on to a rectangular plywood box, Warhol created a three dimensional replica of the actual branded commercial carton that held twenty four giant size packages of Brillo Soap Pads.2 Elaborating further, Danto states: What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification). Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to see it as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting…The world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible.3

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Warhol’s presentation of Brillo Boxes also serves as a key art historical antecedent for Divecha’s Warehouse Project. Both works feature stacks of mass-produced merchandise, which is transposed, symbolically, physically and spatially, from the realm of low culture to that of high culture. And they both seem to elicit comparable questions about their own status as art. I would argue that, in its immediate context, Divecha’s Warehouse Project functions in a way comparable to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. By challenging the conventional definitions of what constitutes an artwork it expands the local repertoire of theory or theories of art, creating and sustaining a different artworld, in which its place is unquestioned and unquestionable. In this essay, I will begin to unravel some of the many cultural, political and economic histories, theories and networks that intersect in Divecha’s complex project, allowing some of the contours of its artworld to become intelligible.

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A hundred or so of these Brillo Boxes were exhibited in stacks in the front room of Warhol’s second show at New York’s Stable Gallery in 1964, alongside other ‘grocery carton’ works. An iconic black and white photograph by noted Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah gives us a sense of what the exhibition looked like. It shows a young Warhol, dressed in a dark button-down shirt and slightly darker slacks, nestled among numerous stacks, each five units tall, of Brillo Boxes, their punchy branding crowding out the frame. If Warhol was not such a recognisable icon of popular culture he could easily be mistaken for a stock boy on break in the storeroom of a suburban supermarket. Ostensibly an installation, though that term had not yet entered the vocabulary of contemporary art, Warhol’s exhibition introduced the vulgar but banal (or better yet, vulgar because banal) site of commerce and consumerism into the rarefied atmosphere of New York’s elite Upper East Side gallery circuit.

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FORM

Divecha has a longstanding interest in threedimensional form and often draws on the aesthetics of Minimalism, from the grid as organising principle to the serial repetition of basic units. Also written in 1964, and published the following year, Donald Judd’s seminal text “Specific Objects” pithily described the then just emerging Minimalist sensibility as a case of simply putting “one thing after another.”4 For Judd, repetition and seriality represented strategies through which to challenge traditional compositional logic, which strove for formal balance. Though specific, his configurations of forms were always contingent. Never intended as absolute truths, they represented somewhat arbitrary sections of an infinite progression, and as such were freed from the burden of significance and the attendant task of holding and communicating some profound inner meaning.5 Repetition and seriality rendered composition insignificant. Meaning was pushed out to the object’s surface as the form became literal.

Rejecting the fetish of artistic subjectivity that was a hallmark of Abstract Expressionism, Judd and colleagues like Carl Andre, were also deeply invested in the removal of all traces of the artist’s hand, the vehicle through which form, style and signature are executed. Judd had the units of his stacks and rows of boxed forms industrially fabricated according to his precise designs and specifications. Relishing in their base materiality, Andre allowed the dimensions and qualities of commercially available industrial and construction materials to dictate the final forms of his sculptures. Divecha also removes all traces of his hand by relinquishing control over form in Warehouse Project. The warehouse remains fully functional throughout the project’s run, accessible around the clock by the company, Atiq Liusie General Trading LLC, whose merchandise

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Carton stacking system at Warehouse Project

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Qualities like seriality, regularity, and the repetition of a basic unit, all remain present in Divecha’s project but, shifted from the industrial to the mercantile sphere, are driven by largely functional not formal considerations. Like Andre, Divecha builds using a preexisting basic unit, and uses it without further manipulation or transformation to create a larger form. As with Andre, the dimensions of the basic unit determine the form, structure and limits of the larger form. In Divecha’s case, however, the unit is not bare matter but packaged

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is housed there. Though sculptural, the stacks within are neither discrete nor permanent; goods are added or removed in response to commercial forces of supply and demand. As the stacks change, shift, mutate – their size and shape at any given moment determined by the real-time machinations of the market – Adam Smith’s otherwise invisible hand materialises into sight, displacing the hand of the artist.

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good, in some cases twice over, and, as such, it is prone to differential and unpredictable types of compression. The final form of the larger structures is additionally affected by other considerations: economy (supply and demand determines the number of available units); function (the units have to be stacked in such a way that affords ease of access, so that some or all can be removed quickly and easily if need be); efficiency (units are arranged in such a way that the maximum amount of storage space is utilised); and safety (units are stacked in such a way that the stack contracts inwards rather than bulges outwards with every additional layer so that they can be made taller, i.e. the central unit in a layer will be replaced with a space or a gap will be left between units). Andre’s forms display a truth to materials, a material honesty that Divecha calls “frugality.”6 Divecha’s stacks, also composed of unadulterated found objects, import this aura of honesty, if only temporarily, into the otherwise messy worlds of commerce and commodity. They also push us to consider if the reverse may be true, if behind the formal purity and material truths of Minimalism lives the beating heart of capitalism.

FLOW

What is not immediately apparent, as one meanders through the warehouse’s increasingly dusty corridors, is the countless hours of research, fieldwork, conversations and negotiations required to realise this project. Divecha first conceived of the project in 2015 and hidden behind its banal appearance is a rich and complex backstory, a diverse network of people, and new and constantly shifting fields of social relations. He is careful to note in the wall text that this project should be understood as a situation not an installation, that it is not a static formal object to be experienced once but a dynamic spatial intervention enabled by

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As a representation of a moment in the flux of commerce, Divecha’s project serves as a material and spatial portrait of Dubai itself, dubbed a “city of warehousing,” among many other appellations,

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To realise this work Divecha brokered a complicated deal that enabled a simple transposition, transforming a newly built warehouse in Alserkal Avenue, an erstwhile art and design complex in the midst of the industrial neighbourhood of Al Quoz, from a specialised space for the display and storage of artworks (i.e. a gallery) into a generalised space for the temporary storage of mass-produced commercial goods in between their sites of production and distribution/consumption (i.e. a warehouse). By temporarily diverting the flow of simple commodities into this transitional hybrid space that is simultaneously one of both commerce and art, of both storage and display, Divecha turns it into a clearly demarcated “spatial node in the global economy of capital circulation,” making it visible to an audience that may otherwise not have access to such a space.7 Momentarily arresting the otherwise nonstop and invisible global circulation of goods Divecha’s project serves as a mirror of sorts, revealing something that, like our own faces, we know exists but cannot normally see. Though through very different means and ends, it achieves an effect comparable to that of Hassan Sharif ’s signature piles and hangings made out of cheap mass-produced commodities. Sharif obsessively breaks these products down and repetitively knots their pieces together, anchoring them physically, arresting their flow. Extracted out of their circuits of production, distribution and consumption, these commodities are, at least temporarily, transformed into mere things, objects that lack all utility and, hence, cannot be easily consumed.

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and that in turn enables various social relations. A conversation with Divecha, who remains accessible throughout the run of the project, provides viewers insight into this process, creating new relations with him and his work.

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by architectural theorist Keller Easterling.8 A hub of cosmopolitan trade for at least two centuries, Dubai’s ethos, raison d’etre, logic and engine is mercantile. The Indian gold merchants of Deira that Neha Vora discusses in her book Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora are just one personification of this very ethos.9 But there are many other strata of trade and labour in this city, from the largely South Asian manual labourers and middle management to the predominantly Western expat corporate management, and Divecha’s project was only realisable through conversations and negotiations within and across these strata.

Divecha’s project belongs not to the immaterial multinational neoliberal economy of finance, information and service but its very real and material underbelly. It exemplifies the logic of Old not New Dubai. Boxed and stacked, the products cannot easily enter the spaces we associate with and that epitomise the regime of neoliberal capitalism, the malls and supermarkets where they will eventually be displayed and consumed.

They would have to first shed all vestiges of commerce and become pure brands again before that would be possible. Instead, in this form, they can only occupy unmarked functional spaces, spaces that are barely architecture, simple shells – like shipping containers, storage units on the backs of trucks and dusty warehouses – that offer protection from weather and theft and enable easy movement.

Atiq Liusie, a Dubai-based general trading company founded in 1980 by three Chinese merchants, first established their business by simply importing one product: Ma Ling, a famous Chinese tomato paste.

The various migrations and networks of people and products encapsulated in this brief snippet of corporate history reveals a particular type of trade that Old Dubai is exemplary of and that, arguably, drives all port cities. This maritime trade network is cosmopolitan but not multinational; it does not emanate globally from the West.

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In the Warehouse Project, Divecha deploys the aesthetics and forms of Minimalism to engage in a type of institutional critique. The intersection and overlap of these two very different strands of avant-garde art may seem cognitively dissonant at first. However, the shift in the act of beholding away from a wall or pedestal mounted art object and onto its surrounding space, structure and architecture that the Minimalist object elicited was necessary for the emergence of institutional critique. With attention redirected towards the artwork’s context, it was inevitable that the social, cultural, economic and political conditions and biases that shaped this context would be interrogated next.

On a basic level, Divecha’s Warehouse Project mounts a critique of the ongoing gentrification of Dubai, in general, and of the Al Quoz

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It is, instead, rhizomatic and multidirectional, often circumventing the West altogether, enabled by and enabling a more complex exchange that is not limited to just goods, services and capital, but extends to cultures, languages, religions and kin.

Facilitated for millennia through maritime trade, this cosmopolitanism has a long history in the global south, and definitively predates the intrusion of European powers with Vasco Da Gama’s arrival at Calicut in 1497, and the so-called ‘Golden Age of Discovery’ that followed. In some sense, Divecha’s project serves as a monument to the intangible and increasingly overshadowed history of maritime trade in Dubai, conducted for centuries by simple wooden dhows, which lies buried deep in the maze-like alleyways of its traditional souks.

However, Divecha’s monument is unstable and transitory, constantly shaping and reshaping itself, like the city itself.

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Architectural model of Alserkal Avenue

neighbourhood specifically, by the forces of neoliberal capital, which routinely instrumentalises art and culture for economic development. It functionally and symbolically reverts a warehouse back to its original commercial function.

Leveraging the privilege and access made available to him as an artist/cultural producer, which afforded him four months of rent-free access to this space, Divecha temporarily extracts the warehouse from the sphere of culture and reinserts it back into a broader economy of trade and commerce by outsourcing its use to Atiq Liusie.

This deal also reminds us of Alserkal Avenue’s role as landlord, that despite its growing ambitions and contributions this cultural institution is simply, or is also, a real estate enterprise. Though familiar in the West, this sort of institutional critique is uncommon in Dubai, and still retains a certain critical edge here.

Divecha’s project also creates a hybrid, ambiguous and multivalent space, which oscillates or hovers between the supposedly discrete spheres of art and capital, forcing an uncomfortable encounter between the two. It challenges claims made by the broader art market that the artworld continues to be a space of refinement and exclusion, operating at a remove from the tawdry world of

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Creating a labile encounter between art and commerce, between institution and commodity, Divecha’s project positions itself firmly between the logics of institutional critique and Pop art.

This uncanny strain of institutional critique, where critique is enacted not through the traditional institutions of art and society but exclusively through modes and spaces of desire and mass consumption, through the realms of trade and commerce, seems somewhat indigenous to the Gulf. It is apparent in GCC’s enthusiastic representation of the consumptive excesses

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all other trade and commerce. In his exhibition text, Divecha asserts that during “their brief stay at Warehouse Project” these commodities “reveal their alternative potential – to step out as art. Located within two circuits of reality, the goods are consumed by an art audience, while still remaining concealed as standardised units.

The shelf life of this instantly accrued surplus ‘art’ value is subtracted the moment they are pushed further to feed another consumption cycle.” 10 The transitory nature of this “surplus ‘art’ value” reveals both the arbitrary manner in which the value of art is determined and assigned and the key role that art institutions (museums and market alike) play in this process. Through proximity and analogy, Warehouse Project seems to strip this immaterial value away from the art that is exhibited and distributed in the neighbouring units, reverting the status of this special class of objects back to that of any ordinary commodity that is produced and consumed remotely but that halts briefly in Dubai simply to exchange hands (given that most of the galleries in Al Quoz show artists based in the region and around the globe and sell to collectors similarly distributed geographically). For a moment the fancy white walls and skylit spaces of the galleries morph into just one more warehouse where merchandise is simply stored and displayed before being dispatched to its eventual consumer; the gallery’s cryptic inventory codes simply read as SKUs.

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of local bureaucracy, in Raja’a Khalid’s subtle revelations of the essential material inauthenticity of local tropes of authenticity, and in Lantian Xie’s sonic and visual appropriations of local fast food culture as modes through which to enact and negotiate a sense of belonging. Vora uses the term “consumer citizenship” to describe the way in which Dubai’s many Indian communities exercise their belonging through the accumulation and expenditure of capital, free of any political concerns, restrictions or obligations. 11 However, here, the realm of capital does seem to represent one of the few truly democratic public spheres, and the free market might be the only institution with enough breathing room to allow for rigorous critique. For the denizens of this city, consumption is not simply a privileged act of desire but also a duty and a right.

END NOTES 1 Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61, No. 19 (Oct. 15, 1964): 571-584.

2 For a detailed discussion of the production, exhibition and reception of these objects see Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol (New Haven: Yale University Press), 47-71.

3 Danto op cit., 581.

4 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 74-82.

5 Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), 243-266.

6 Vikram Divecha, personal interview with the author, March 10, 2016.

7 Vikram Divecha, exhibition text.

8 Keller Easterling, “Extrastatecraft,” Perspecta 39: The Yale Architectural Journal, ed. Kanu Agrawal, Melanie Domino, Edward Richardson and Bard M. Walters (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press), 4-16.

9 Neha Vora, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

10 Divecha, exhibition text.

11 Vora, 136-141.

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Toward A Common Satisfaction of Needs: The Ongoing Situation of the Warehouse Project My name is Debra Levine. I am a performance studies scholar and I teach at New York University, Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Since last September, I also have been working with Vikram Divecha as his mentor. Mentoring is a service Tashkeel offers to the emerging artists who are currently under their sponsorship. Vikram could have choosen whomever he wanted for the role, within limits, from a number of academics, including those at NYUAD, and I think he and I may have talked about how he chose me at the beginning of our relationship. But now, I don’t have a clear memory of it. I do teach social practice art. But on paper, I hardly seem a proper fit as an interlocutor for this visual artist.

Nevertheless, he did select me – in Tinder parlance one would say he swiped right and picked the middle-aged, Jewish New Yorker who currently lives in Abu Dhabi. It still confounds me why he did so. And it took us a while to connect. I don’t fully know Vikram’s side of the story – we haven’t reflected much on our relationship. So I guess this becomes a public/private space to do so.

I like what we do together and I like what our relationship has become. It feels creative and challenging. Though we hardly try and make sense of what we do (and here I am speaking for myself only) I would say the relationship satisfies my needs and it seems to satisfy his.

Our meetings are pleasurable; at least, they are for me. Each time we encounter one another, it feels less like a discussion and more like an invitation for both of us to reconfigure our associational lives – his in Dubai and Mumbai, mine in Abu Dhabi and Brooklyn – as well as shift in how we each associate with other institutions, corporations,objects and ideas. I attribute this in part to how, in the past six months, we have oriented ourselves to one another.

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85 I am drawn to what I would call Vikram’s open spirit of “re-orientation” – you can see thatIKONHOUSE aspect of him in 64his earlier63 works. In particular I am thinking of 65 62 Shaping Resistance (2015), which, when we talk 86/87 61 59 60 58 each week, we call “The Gardener's Project”. That AN INANIMATE ART BARTER LIFE IS VILLAGE BEAUTIFUL work, similar toFARHAD theMOSHIRI Warehouse Project (2016), ZAHRA AL GHAMDI LEILA HELLER came to fruition when Vikram saw the potential GALLERY for a slight paradigm shift in the organisational II THE structures that already exist. His art is the touch CIRCLE GAME 90/91 that realigns a field of relations and reconfigures MARY ELLEN CARROLL its forces. Vikram’s specific touch is slight, yet MAIN THE YARD ENTRANCE persistent. Realignments happen, materially, juridically and economically. While those changes 88/89 THE have a distinct social and political impact, all of YARD MAJLIS those forces can onlyIIbe accessed through an aesthetic interface that Vikram constructs.

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JEAN-PAUL NAJAR Instead, he places them in tension with the FOUNDATION constellation of bodies and objects that act in them in order to interrupt how normative stories place1 limits on social relations. When we first spoke about this project, he began with a pre-existing image and narrative. In Vikram’s mind, the stacks 2 of boxes that accumulated in the warehouse GULF PHOTO SHOWCASE PLUS brought in by the toy distribution company were 36 35 34 sculptural forms, contained by the building’s walls.

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Vikram contends with these hegemonic narratives.

What he also knows, like Smithson, is that dominant narratives can serve as subterfuge for the new that percolates under them. In Vikram’s work, the role of sculptor becomes a question rather than a given. And like Smithson, the force collaborates with, rather than opposes a dominant narrative of sculpture.

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But we, who have some knowledge of art’s twentieth century history, already know that story.

Growing up, Vikram considered himself a sculptor.

And in the age of so much self-invention, it’s difficult to give up what each of us believes to be our true nature. While Vikram knew the modernist art genealogy through which stacked boxes could be narrated – that form and volume of boxes had been the preoccupation of modernism, that matter as materiality in itself and as representation that traffics in the commercial world is the purview of Duchamp and Warhol – he shifts how force is configured in sculpture. Force is rarely a question.

Probably the most important shift is when Robert Smithson located it in the spectatorial eye when creating monuments from New Jersey's exurban landscapes. But the force in this case still remained an exertion of the sculptor.

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Abdul Bhai, one of the first visitors of Warehouse Project

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Goods being moved in at Warehouse 82.

Vikram knows dominant narratives are supple things.

The lightest touch can disarticulate or disfigure them in such a way that social life of Dubai, the overall narrative of which is stratification, can connect under the radar of the hegemonic. As often as some kind of object appears as a final sculpture, what also gets sculpted, re-configured, are the stratified social groups that touch through the capacious process of making the work. And because the artwork is a durational and ongoing situation, that social reconfiguration rises to our consciousness.

The sensation of heterogeneous contact among people in Dubai is catalysed by this particular work.

The Warehouse Project challenges and resists the imaginary narrative of a city divided. That dominant and domineering story, accessed through the myriad of digital and televisual sites, is told through very different aesthetic interfaces - graphs, television commercials, trade and human rights reports and tourist brochures.

This project allows us to consider what it means to work under the radar of a brittle narrative that labours to consolidate an account of the contemporary moment in Dubai and the UAE. Juridically, it offers an imaginative leeway to move in the city among very different classes and interest groups through circuits that already exist. Vikram’s touch organises the matrix of economic, material and affective ties into a visible situation. That is essential, for Vikram is an artist of contemporary Dubai.

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To loop back to the folksy part of my talk, I’ll tell you a way that Vikram attunes himself to the situation of our relationship, It was only recently that Vikram stopped asking me for a curriculum vitae. The art world, like academia demands a narrative, a history, a pedigree, it requires a visual and verbal narrative that brands and identifies and links together the success of the institution, the state and the performer (the academic, the artist) Dubai and the UAE exemplify that effort.

So for many months with Vikram, I mostly evaded his requests. It wasn’t exactly play for me but I did consciously enjoy the evasion. But most importantly, it was a political gesture. Vikram may or may not have recognised as such, but as a fifty-five year old woman, having lived through the straightjacket of identity politics and the dominance

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Vikram also knows destination is an already foreclosed narrative. Warehouse Project, much like Dubai, is a situation. A situation is different than a destination – it conjures productive crisis and it invites flux. But a critical (different from a critique) aesthetic rendering of a situation does not merely replicate the flux or hold a magnifying glass to it. instead, it reorients engagement so that those who are enmeshed become attuned to its particularities and unrealised possibilities. The “situation” happens when Dubai yields its image as a destination and becomes susceptible to pressures (presented as aesthetic, but the operations could be political, economic or social) that allow capacities to surface, capacities that formerly had only existed as potentialities.

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Vikram’s work becomes itself because he is present to, observant of, and embedded in this place - in these flows of neoliberal capital and labour, in the cultural and natural landscape, in a network of artists and art institutions, living and working with the municipality’s ideas of temporality and duration as it constantly revises the built environment, in the middle of its becoming as an art and cultural destination.

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of biopolitics in the later half of the twentieth century in the US and now, in the UAE, as I feel myself both highly surveilled. Many times in the UAE, I also feel myself as a body whose worth is almost solely measured by my function in relation to the state. But as Vikram has shown me, the UAE operates in another realm too. There are so many ways to “do” relationships. Vikram reveals that there is much leeway. In this case, for a while at least, I could evade those terms. Until now when I could use them better in a way that feels far more satisfactory to me.

I also choose to see our relationship as a situation that I play for my own satisfaction. Refusals, evasions and reorientations follow a line of queer practice – but it’s the UAE and so I don’t use those words with Vikram. But in the UAE I feel the contradictions the most, seen and unseen, essential and extraneous. I feel myself locked into my identification as a subject of the state: middle-aged, white, American, single, Jewish, woman, academic. But I feel my enmeshment with Vikram as a space of queerness where my daily differentiation is destabilised. The Warehouse Project does that too, performative roles of the state, worker and manager, art and commodity, warehouse and gallery, blur when the pair’s needs are addressed. Both are felt more pleasurably because of the turns when each partner finds herself or himself in the place of the other and back again.

This is micropolitics to be sure. “Political” with a small “p” that does not address the huge discrepancies in the distribution of social goods in the UAE and across the world that is also referenced by the Warehouse Project.

Nevertheless, in this political landscape, Vikram insists on the differentiation and blurring within a matrix of relations. For me, that is a queer project.

Queer negates generality and allows for relational exchanges to catalyse the capacities of one another’s historical, political, and personal vitality.

In the UAE, this undoing exists ephemerally and

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It’s not that Vikram doesn’t comply with the demands on him to be legible to the world as an artist either, for Vikram is not without ego. That ego however, is then placed in service of risk and possible failure, of exploration and collaboration.

As we began to work, what we had only was the “idea” of our relationship. That structure of our relationship cannot be completely transcended.

But after six months of regular contact, much like the Warehouse Project, and partially because of it, we have oriented ourselves differently to one another. Our relationship too is an ongoing situation. We sense that we are onto something, that it satisfies both our needs and makes a third thing. What we do together is not wholly definable or legible but we very much feel its influence, here in this warehouse.

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is best accessed in the realm of the sensate. The body in public performance, my field of expertise, had been the almost exclusive site that allowed for a becoming different; differently beyond the stratifications of law and narrative. But now, with the force of capitalism acting directly as the visible hand of the sculptor, the Warehouse Project and my relationship with Vikram, revised how I understand what I had believed had been in the realm of performance only in the UAE. Now, I believe the situation also communicates a sense of queer vitalism.

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Murtaza Vali in conversation with employees of Atiq Liusie

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Marketing Presentation: Boxed Branded Plush Toys as Art [SLIDE 1] MARKETING PRESENTATION: BOXED BRANDED PLUSH TOYS AS ART Thank you everybody for coming. As you can see from my title slide this is a marketing presentation about the work in which we are currently sitting, Vikram Divecha’s Warehouse Project. I am an esteemed Brand and Marketing Consultant. I will come to my own presentation in a second, but I’d like to go through the objectives of today’s meeting.

The first thing I want to do is interrogate the warehouse space: we’re going to be looking at the marketing strategies deployed by the brands that are active in this space. You may say that there are no brands here. But there are brands, and they all have strategies.

I’d also like to examine how these brand objectives are met by what’s going on in this space and the marketing apparatus that is surrounding us at this moment.

I’d also like to determine how these strategies are actually intensifying consumer desire around the brands themselves, and by extension the products.

And I’d also like to understand how the products that you see here will be injected into new consumer streams and go on to have other target audiences beyond the people sitting in this room and circulating all throughout Alserkal Avenue.

Lastly, what I’d like to do is consider other brands that aren’t here, that aren’t visible in this space, that will come on to this stream and will be the ones to herald the coming of this Warehouse Project into other streams.

Now a word on your presenter. I am an independent brand and marketing consultant with 31 whopping years of experience. Hold on to your seats. I advise companies on GWACs, IDIQs GS schedules and open market sales, and I have made

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billions for my clients simply on marketing ROI. So among my achievements, I am in the top 200 LinkedIn marketing professionals worldwide and I also happen to be a best selling author.

[SLIDE 2] WHAT WILL WE COVER? What we’ll cover today, I don’t expect you to read all of this. I do expect you to follow me through this journey of three main chapters. One of which is about the brands that are here; the display in which these brands play; and lastly the sales that are generated beyond this space.

[SLIDE 3] KEY TENSION POINTS® But first, some context. This tool is called Key Tension Points®. It’s a thinking tool that I patented and market in many of my best selling books. But the KTP® essentially creates a framework around which we can analyse brand behaviour and strategy.

So first of all, Warehouse Project defies marketing.

If you look around you, you will see that this is a space where marketing doesn’t happen. Procter and Gamble will tell you that marketing happens at the point of sale, from the shelf out. Marketing happens on your mobile phones, marketing happens in the aisles of the retail space and yet I believe that there is a very, very heavy marketing apparatus at work in this project.

This space is kind of a non-space – it’s neither here nor there. It’s in a cultural landscape, yet it is also a warehouse. So it’s an inventory, but it is also an artwork. I think in spite of this nondescript space, this has become a place of intensified consumer desire. And this consumer desire will intensify even further, as I’ll try to show you.

The artist has excerpted all of these products, temporarily, from the stream in which they normally operate. So these things shouldn’t be here; these things should not be next to galleries. These things should be in a warehouse somewhere else. But in

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This project has a time limit of four months.

However the trader, who is getting this warehouse for free for this period, has somehow factored this gain, this economic gain, into his profit and loss – into his balance sheet. So how does that work when the project ends? How does the trader – who may have even have reconfigured his stocks to take advantage of this space – how does that change once the project and this art space go back to being rented to, say, a gallery?

Lastly, all of these goods have enhanced perceptions. It’s no longer just Hello Kitty, but its Hello Kitty. It’s a piece of art. It’s the formalism of something like this. If you’re looking at this as an artwork you’ll start reading this in its formalist grammar of how it's put together, much like you would read minimalist art. All of these things are no longer just boxes of stock and inventory.

There’s something much, much bigger. If I were talking in an art world presentation, which I am not, since this is a marketing presentation, I would use the word "aura" here. But I am not going to use that word. But in any case, what I’m curious about, being a marketeer, is this idea of price optimisation. So now that the goods have become enhanced in their status, they are no longer simply products, they are actually bigger, more valuable things. How is that price optimised by the different brands that work here?

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These goods are invisible. You see "Hello Kitty" on the box, but you cannot see Hello Kitty inside. You cannot say hello to kitty. But, the brands are super powerful. Even though you don’t see them, the conjuration of the brand is present on the box; its power is emanating out of the box.

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fact, these things will be inserted into an entirely new consumer stream that we’ll cover in a second.

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[SLIDE 4] WHO ARE THE BRANDS? [SLIDE 5] WHAT IS THE HIERARCHY? Who are these brands? What are their power relations and how do they behave? I would say we have four brands. First of all we have all the brands of the toys. You have IQ Robot, you have Hello Kitty, you have Tiny Tykes and it goes on and on. There’s a list of a page and a half in a Word document. You have the trader. What’s really interesting here is that Atiq Liusie is the trader to whom the artist has rented this warehouse and whose logo is a barcode. And these brands are only known as barcodes. There’s a slight irony that’s really interesting. The codification of the brand as a product that you can’t see, is also working for the codification of the trader whom you can’t see either. Next, you have the artist.

Yes, the artist is a brand and increasingly, since even before Andy Warhol, artists have been very powerful brands who work very carefully on their marketing and self-promotion. Last, but not least, you have the landlord who is really responsible for the inception of the project to start with.

So all of these brands are in a hierarchy of power.

So when I talk about hierarchy, I’m really talking about how these brands interact with each other.

The power relations are interesting because the landlord is the point of inception; the landlord is the patriarch in many ways. These toys are somehow silent children. They can’t speak because they are in boxes, they are muted, they are taped up – they have no voice.

There’s also a power relation in terms of visibility.

I would say your visibility line is between the artist and the trader. The toys are invisible, yet there is a great deal of visibility conferred on both artist and landlord, through the way that they promote and market themselves. The landlord and the artist are two power brands, and the Warehouse Project has tremendous impact on their brand equity. For the

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So how does each of these brands behave? For the toys and for the traders, I’m describing it as brand behaviour. They don’t have a strategy, because they don’t necessarily have a great deal of power in this Warehouse Project. The artist and the landlord are the power brands; they operate strategically.

These toys have all been reduced to SKUs. The name alone has to conjure the brand for you. The power of Hello Kitty makes you imagine that brand.

Everything is coded – everything is reduced to a code, a weight, to some kind of number or quantity.

The boxes bear the marks of their transit. Very often you’ll see that they’ve been stamped in some places or written on in others. The product has been somewhere else; it is foreign to this environment.

It encapsulates an origin: most often and probably almost exclusively, China. The evocation of ‘Made in China’ already is positing things in your head, of what that means. Generally what that means is the labour process. You see sweatshops full of people piecing together or stuffing Hello Kitty on the production line.

The trader’s behaviour is one of appropriation. His name is made on the back of the brand name. He’s only famous because Hello Kitty is famous. He’s only famous because he has had Hamley’s or Toys R Us

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There’s an absent brand in all of this, which is the retailer. The retailer is invisible in this space simply because he is not in the flow yet. When these products leave here and go back to their normal stream, the retailer will come online. So the retailer is the client of the trader.

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trader and the toys, there is practically none. And I would also say that those two power brands control the marketing channels the most masterfully. They are the ones out there who are sending Facebook posts and doing everything. Whereas the trader is taking advantage of a warehouse that’s also an art space. So his ability to capitalise on that will depend very much on how savvy he is about the mechanisms behind it.

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as a client. His principal role is stewardship. It’s getting something from here to there, making sure it’s safe, making sure that there’s no baksheesh that has to be paid, or if it does, it doesn’t show up in the books. He has an obvious benefit in his P&L simply because this is free space.

If you calculate that in terms of his own revenue, his turnover, it’s not insignificant, in terms of financial benefits for him. It also provides him with a new arena of exposure. He’s reaching people that he hasn’t been able to reach before. Even by virtue of the fact that he’s in a wall text in an art space, it’s catapulting him into new areas that were until now undreamed of for him. He’s using this timidly, I would say, because he’s discovered a new marketing channel, which I suspect he only realised during Art Week. The power of it has brought some of his VIP clients here to see these boxes, which are now conferred with the status of art.

So imagine this for a minute. Can you think of this man taking people to his normal warehouse, elsewhere in Al Quoz, and bringing his clients to see the box? Here, he brings his VIP client to show him the wall text. The wall text is what anchors it.

People like me are what anchor it, in this new value that it has. In his normal space, he would never ever do this: they are just goods in his warehouse.

Here they stop being goods and become something else. So how does he PR that?

When we come to the artist, we start getting strategic. The artist is a brand. He’s a person, he’s sitting here, but he’s also a brand. This brand is not represented by a gallery. I think it’s important to state that, because many artists are. So this already is going to influence the strategy that he has going for him. Without gallery representation, he has invested a warehouse, which is also a gallery. Next door, these are also galleries. So the duality of this space is not innocent. This person without a gallery has co-opted a gallery in the guise of a warehouse.

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Now the brand strategy of the landlord. As you may know, there is a tremendous brand evolution happening with Alserkal Avenue. And I think even the use of word landlord is not really a word that is confortable anymore when referring to Alserkal.

Alserkal does not necessarily want to be seen as a landlord anymore. Alserkal wants to be seen as a cultural destination. And even, I know this from having spoken to Mr Alserkal, an arts organisation.

So beyond a destination; a level up even.

So there’s definitely an enhancement of the Alserkal product offering here, because the Warehouse Project is cool. I mean the cool kids like work like this. It’s not a painting, it's cool. It

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He’s diverted these goods to a new destination. I would say there’s a certain disingenuousness here.

Vikram will tell you, “I just let this project happen, man. This just goes on its own. Like the goods come in, the goods go out. And I just provide the space.” And that’s really cool; but it’s completely false. Because there’s tremendous control over this project. The workers who come here, we’ll get to that in a second. But even the brand owner, the trader himself, has only certain knowledge to which he is allowed access through the prism of Vikram Divecha, the artist.

KEVIN JONES

He’s made a very critical gesture. If you were here last week when Deborah Levine was talking, she said that one of the things Vikram does is that he realigns something very slightly – there’s a small disruption that has enormous change somewhere else down the line. I won't go through all of his practice, but this is a very critical gesture about capitalism, about the flow of the goods, to a certain degree about cultural institutions and how they function. You can read it on the wall text. But because there is wall text and because it is in Alserkal, the critical gesture is very safely and nicely framed. It’s a confirmation of this realignment as a signature process for this artist.

This is part of him building his brand and the continuity and consistency of what he does.

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cuts down things. It bolsters this transition away from the landlord and into the arts organisation.

But there’s also a credibilisation process at work here. A work like this – and there is some irony in this – credibilises Alserkal as projecting an interesting and cool new type of art in precisely in the realm that they are trying to get away from, which is being a landlord of warehouses. But that irony will have repercussions down the line.

So how do all the brands fulfil their strategies?

Let’s look specifically at the artist and the landlord.

[SLIDE 6] VIKRAM WITH ARROWS Here you have the artist. And this is where it gets a little bit complicated. The artist comes to us with a legacy of work like this. The artist comes to us with stacked boxes – stacked pieces like Carl Andre – mimimalist art. He’ll invite you to see the formalism in all this. And the formalism is very much there and can be very beautiful. But there’s also something akin to Gordon Matta-Clark, where you actually look at things that are split or spaces that exist. Gordon Matta-Clark work was not in a gallery space, and I think that’s important to keep in mind as well; it was somewhere else, just like we are not really in a gallery.

This audience – we are part of his marketing strategy. I am a pawn in his marketing strategy. I am a cog in the marketing system. The wall text is collateral, the wall text is a pamphlet, the wall text is something that is used to promote. Every word is carefully chosen, every ‘thank you’ is carefully administered. The bullet points are also there from the landlord. So the landlord’s process has seeped into the marketing tool of the artist. So you see some bullet points that are from the hand of the lawyer and you see some of them in the first paragraph as well. Last, but not the least, there is a book deal in the works for the artist, as part of his marketing campaign, which is great. All of these videos will be streamed on Ibraaz, thanks to great lobbying and marketing acumen deployed by the artist.

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So that concludes the part of the brand.

Next is the display.

[SLIDE 8] DISPLAY DYNAMICS: INVISIBILITY When I say display I’m purposely using a term that comes from retail marketing. I want to look at the dynamics of this space. The dynamics are largely invisible. There is no display here. You’ll tell me there is no display and I can’t disagree with you. And I think that this was the very first box that came into this place on these palettes, I think way back in February. So what’s interesting is that when you look at this single box, it’s not unlike a wrapped gift. You can’t see inside of it. There’s an expectation to discover what’s inside of it. You are kind of knowingly prohibited from seeing the inside. This invisibility gives the impression that it is brand new. It just got here. No one has seen it.

It’s untouched; it’s unseen. It’s like this innocence and purity that comes from the land of toys that are in the space of innocence and purity. It’s all part of this mechanism. I would say that this invisibility, as anyone who has ever done a teasing campaign will tell you, heightens the consumer desire.

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The landlord. Alserkal Avenue is transitioning away form the warehouse, in a very cool way.

Let’s give credit where credit is due. They are content creators. They will take this and like it online. Here is just a little small GIF that was put up on Instagram. But more importantly there is an international dimension to what Alserkal is doing.

So they travel, books will travel, videos will travel.

So all of these things will go to other places and be endowed with even more brand credibility and brand glory for Alserkal.

KEVIN JONES

[SLIDE 7] ALSERKAL WITH ARROWS

KEVIN JONES

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[SLIDE 9] DISPLAY DYNAMICS: QUANTITY [SLIDE 10] CCTV WITH MURTAZA VALI But there are also the dynamics of quantity.

There isn’t just one box. There are how many?

Thousands, tens of thousands of products; probably thousands of boxes. Ironically this quantity incites a new kind of consumer fetish. You may recognise this gentleman as Murtaza Vali, who is a curator here. Murtaza is one of many, let’s say, consumers who have wandered into the art space, and who fluctuate between being consumers and art professionals. What is interesting with Murtaza and others is that looking at these boxes becomes a new fetish. The space becomes a space of sampling. People who come in here – particularly parents – request samples. Other people came in here with their children. Oddly, the non-commercial nature of this space has not diminished the desire. The desire now becomes not to purchase something, but to have something for free. So I should have a sample and I’m going to go around the marketing completely. I’m not targeted on my smart phone, I’m not targeted through messages or billboards. I’ve gone around that, because I can get it just by sticking my hand in the box. This idea of all this quantity means that one Hello Kitty is not going to be missed, is she? I can have that one.

So this non-consumerist space actually, like the gift you can’t see, intensifies the desire. And it’s not just one person, but several people have come in and requested samples and started to see this as a place of mouthwatering product freeness.

Last but not the least, and this is kind of the point that I’m trying to come to, is this idea of sales.

[SLIDE 11] HOW IS THE ECONOMIC GAIN OF FREE RENT PROCESSED? This is a gentleman from Atiq Liusie, the trader.

I think he’s in charge of marketing, sales, warehousing. This is a shot taken by the artist of

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[SLIDE 12] BOXES ON PALETTE IN GALLERY What is the status of these goods when they leave this warehouse? When this project is complete in a couple of months from now, what do these goods become? They have to go to a lambda warehouse somewhere, where they’ll just be goods. Or they can become art. They could actually float in galleries and go to biennales and be photographed and be in magazines and have a life of their own as the art object, to which they have been hoisted now. They’ve been raised to this status.

[SLIDE 13] CONSUMER IS NOW THE COLLECTOR So now the consumer who used to just buy toys is now a collector. We’re talking to a collector, who you may recognise this gentleman as well. The collector is now someone that we need to target with this stuff. But the collector has kids, right. So what are the kids? Are the kids consumers or are the kids collectors as well? Because if you put a box of Hello Kittys in a collectors' living room, taped up the way they are, do you think the kids are going to let the Hello Kittys sit there? No. But a Memo of Understanding from the artist to make sure the boxes don’t get opened up by the kids will consolidate the status of these works as art and not as toys. So these goods will have to remain unseen to continue being art. Otherwise the

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But how does that trickle down to the consumer.

Does it? I can’t tell you. I don’t have the answer.

I haven’t asked him. But I wonder if it does. I wonder to what degree there is a consumer benefit from free warehouse for four months. So this guy had extra stock and would have needed to rent a warehouse.

KEVIN JONES

the moment that he received the free warehouse for four months. So the artist has introduced into this system a slight glitch because he has given this warehouse for free, which doesn’t happen.

And again part of the process was convincing the guy to have it.

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opening on the box reduces them to mere products for children.

[SLIDE 14] THE NEW MARKETEERS So the last point that I want to make is that around this new status of the artwork-which-used-to-begoods, you have a whole new realm of brands that are going to open up. Legions of new brands that are going to be involved in the marketing of this. So what I’m calling them new marketeers are gallerists on one level, curators on another, who will sink their curatorial teeth into the project and take it far and wide, and writers. So writers will also want to do this. And these are all the brands who will seize the opportunity of a project like this, in order to promote themselves as well. Okay? So none of this is done innocently in any way. Some have a monetary value to it, others have a brand image and a brand equity value to it.

[SLIDE 15] THE DUALITY OF THE LANDLORD BRAND [SLIDE 16] QUOTE I’d like to finish with just this whole kind of duality of the landlord brand. Because the landlord is the one brand through all of this, explained by its position at the top of the pyramid, which benefits no matter what this stuff is. Even if was just basic goods, they would still benefit from it because it could be a warehouse, right? So this is another quote from the marketing material aka wall text, which states, “Real estate, art and commodities all become equivalent containers when they are sheltered by the Alserkal neighbourhood.” I think I would just like to leave you with that thought this evening.

Thank you for having me here today. I’m very excited to be presenting today, as I’ll be talking about some ideas that my firm is currently working on that you will see in the very near future. Much of this comes from research that we received at this year’s Davos Summit, the South by Southwest Summit in Austin, the 2016 Concordia Summit, and others. We think this information is singularly interesting, and we hope it will be of use. Lastly, I just got in from London at 3:20 today where I was meeting with British PMs, so I hope I will present tonight’s information with conciseness and clarity.

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T H E N E X T R E A L LY G R E A T T H I N G . T H E F U T U R E A S S P E C U L A T I V E F R O N T I E R .

The Next Really Great Thing. The Future as Speculative Frontier.

ADAM CLIFTON

ADAM CLIFTON

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In order to talk about the future, we need to look at the past. And in this talk I’ll be talking about the economics of the past in order to talk about the economics of the future; the Next Really Great Thing.

For decades, the world economic system was beholden to the notion of material guarantees, such as the gold standard.

These sort of systems have limits, and in order for capitalism to grow, new ways have to be found to transcend them.

And doing away with these sorts of economic boundaries is what I feel will be the foundations of the future.

[SLIDE 2] For example, the US Dollar was once a guaranteed currency. What I mean by this is that for every thousand dollars or so by today’s standards, there was an ounce of gold in Fort Knox in Kentucky.

While this makes certain guarantees and gives certain stabilities, it isn’t good for business, as it prescribes certain limits.

[SLIDE 3] Certain visionaries like the American President Richard Nixon understood this, and in the early 70s he signed legislation that did away with the Bretton-Woods system that pegged the worth of the dollar to the gold standard.

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Here in Dubai, there has been a lot of talk about the future. This makes perfect sense, as the UAE is the country of the Future; just look at what’s been done in just 44 years. Actually, I remember growing up in the Midwestern United States, and I found a picture of the Emirates Towers that look just like an illustration in a science fiction book I read as a child. Therefore, to be here with you tonight, to talk about the Next Really Great Thing, that is, The Future, is like a childhood dream. So, let’s get under way.

ADAM CLIFTON

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With this, Nixon did much towards set the world’s economic system free. Not only would the valuation of gold no longer be tied to nations per se, the valuation of currencies would now be linked to the markets, which was a tremendous advance in economic policy. What resulted was greater fluidity in markets, which, as I’ll illustrate, has led to incredible potentials for the Future.

This brings me to the notion of limits and resources. This has been a great concern of in recent days, and colleagues of mine at universities in the Americas dealing with sustainability are talking about an exciting topic. This is the PostResource Economy.

For example, like the Gold Standard, many parts of our economy are tied to the speculation of certain commodities, like oil, wheat, diamonds, the coltan used in our phones.

This has led to everything from economic instabilities due to drought, regional conflicts, and so on.

[SLIDE 4] Once again, these problems are due to material valuations that lead to limits to the infinite capacity of free-market capitalism that can be remedied by doing what Nixon did, and unlinking material valuation from simple supply and demand and move toward that of speculation. This is revolutionary in terms that the digital revolution will be able to navigate us through the human landscape of labour and capital. In essence, what we are talking about is culture.

Caption: “Capitalism Works for Me!” Courtesy Steve Lambert.

Which brings me to one of the reasons why I’m here. In regards to our discussions of the future and humanity, there is a lot of discussion about the notion of cultural capital. And not being that familiar with the arts,I think what little I’ve seen the work here illustrates that wonderfully.

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[SLIDE 6] As I said, I don’t know that much about art, but I always liked Warhol’s Brillo boxes, and I was a little inspired by the warehouse here to say that Warhol should have filled a gallery full of boxes of Brillo pads, or Campbell’s Soup cans, or nylons, or what have you, because that’s what impacts people’s lives, capital and goods, and I think Warhol saw that.

And if you look around you, I think that capitalists do far more creative things on a daily basis than any artist I’ve known, honestly. I mean some financial instruments and the way they’re constructed are truly works of art.

[SLIDE 7] And that brings us to the future. This year in Davos, my colleagues and I in the world’s top areas of economics noticed some clear trends in the world economy.

First, the global workforce is changing. We’re getting older, we are more dependent on knowledge as a driver of wealth in the labour force, and...

[SLIDE 8] ...technology is not necessarily creating the same distribution of jobs that it is replacing.

[SLIDE 9] What this means is two things: Not only are we moving into a post-resource economy, we are also moving into a Post-Labour economy. To accelerate the world economy into long-term sustainability

T H E N E X T R E A L LY G R E A T T H I N G . T H E F U T U R E A S S P E C U L A T I V E F R O N T I E R .

But I’d like to go a step further. I think cultural capital is a term is a little problematic. Culture, cultural capital – Why don’t we just be honest that in a neoliberal free market economy that capital is culture.

ADAM CLIFTON

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as technology accumulates wealth into those who control it, we need to separate business from the exchange of goods and the use of labour. Or at least think of ways in which we need them much, much less. This is because the nature of the population and the extraction of value will be very different in the future.

But you say, Adam, what about 1999? What about 2008? What about 1929? Aren’t market forces full of inherent instabilities? Well, if we look at the Standard and Poor’s and Dow Jones Indices since their inception, we can see that invariably each correction has been followed by a significant expansion in the markets. Since 2008, the expansion of wealth has been an amazing 200% plus! Furthermore, the Futurist Ray Kurzweil’s numbers regarding expansion of technology, its impact on industry and general welfare match very closely the models that we saw at the Davos summit.

And in regards to things like climate change, I like to refer to 9/11 memorial architect Daniel Liebeskind’s positive approach that any piece of architecture has to respond to its climate, and should thrive in it whatever it is, and I believe the same for the world economy.

In short, humanity has always gone through a series of booms, busts, and reached limits to find new models. Minor problems like the current distribution of wealth currently seen in offshore holding companies are surely just issues related to what we call late stage capitalism. Nixon realised the limitations of linking currency to material like gold as a key factor limiting growth, and if we are to realise the future, we need to make the markets much less dependent on things like the simple exchange of commodities like we have here in this warehouse and the labour that create them.

[SLIDE 10] What we need is a way to accelerate capitalism to create value on its own terms, and a way to

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And all we need to build the future is to realise is that the economies of the future have to be built on what is made of, and that is time. In the future, what our key point of leverage is, our main commodity is exactly that – time. We have been leveraging the distant past to build the future by using mineral and fossil biological resources, but why can’t we build the markets by extracting value out of the distant future. Well, because the future is the one thing that we’ll have plenty of. And, as they say, �time is money�.

Let me use a metaphor.

Let’s go back to the Jurassic period. Dinosaurs walked the earth for millions of years, and it’s safe to say that we probably wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for a little asteroid in the Yucutan wiping everything out.

[SLIDE 11] So, let’s just imagine that the Chicxulub Asteroid Impact had never happened, and that reptiles developed their civilisation for millions of years.

[SLIDE 12] And what if they had compound interest? What do you mean by that? Simple. As a child, many of our parents took us to the bank to open a savings account where it would bear an amount of interest every year, which was then placed back into the account, which worked for itself !

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And I have two propositions to do that. One entails a simple principle of wealth building, and the other being an innovative partnership between business and world governments that merge a form of social democracy with hyperaccelerated capitalism that I think will propel us into that next great thing.

And I say this as we need to consider new models that really seek to innovate while maintaining the world’s markets.

ADAM CLIFTON

maintain the population and the Earth at the same time while continuing to build the markets.

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And I hope that you’re starting to see what I’m getting at here. If a Tyrannosaurus Rex family invested, say, a few thousand dirhams, at an interest rate of two and a half percent at a compound interest, even accounting for inflation, they would be adjusted millionaires in a matter of decades, and billionaires decades after this, and trillionaires decades after.

In fact, if a given body of liquidity remains in the market for millions of years, my figures, again accounted for inflation, were numbers where the number of dirhams was greater than the number of molecules of our entire planet! Think of it! A world of infinite wealth.

[SLIDE 13] So, this is a little graphic my daughter showed me off the web of something called the Philosoraptor asking, if “time is money, is an ATM a time machine?” I say, exactly.

Again, you might ask, what about income distribution, standards of living, and so on.

[SLIDE 14] While Ronald Reagan’s theory of trickle-down economics has not borne out within forty years as well as we’d like, what I want to explain is that he missed two key points. We didn’t throw enough capital behind the idea, and certainly for hardly enough time, and I think that trillions of dollars being held offshore as shown in the Panama Papers can actually be our saving grace. They can be used, given time, to subsidise the public sector and maintain a minimum living wage for most of the world while being utilised to create wealth for the private sector. But there will be a synergy that comes back as well. But let’s get back to the past and the future.

So, we speculate on and profit from the distant past in the form of oil, water, and other mineral resources, why not the distant future?

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[SLIDE 15] Now this is where it gets interesting. Place the loans speculating on future employment (small to micro-loans, preferably) onto the mass unemployed displaced by automation. Then manage the exponential compounding of wealth on the higher end, and we have a marvellous synergy. I feel this could be a partnership between the private and public where both fund one another to some extent, and gain general success. I believe we need to maintain our infrastructure and each other. So, some construction and service will help manage lower end debt, and automation and leveraged capital do the rest.

[SLIDE 16] Although this may sound like a scenario from science fiction, like Metropolis, or The Matrix, such a scenario could maintain an otherwise unsustainable 99% at a livable level, with means and education, while allowing a market unfettered by material limitations to flourish!

T H E N E X T R E A L LY G R E A T T H I N G . T H E F U T U R E A S S P E C U L A T I V E F R O N T I E R .

What I’m suggesting are moves towards leveraging the future. Combined with exponential growth of assets due to compounding as mentioned before, we could have a minimum living income in most of the world that maintains the mass population to levels that should be quite acceptable by First World terms and perhaps luxurious by Third World terms.

ADAM CLIFTON

We may have to, as American Futurist Jerry Kaplan said at this year’s South by Southwest summit in Austin that in a matter of decades, first world countries like the United States may see up to 90% unemployment in by 2036 due to automation. And while this may be true, he also advocates financial instruments, loans, etc. for reeducation that are liens against future contingent employment after retraining. And Wired editor Steve Kasich says that the next fifty years, because of robotics and AI, will make the last look like we’re standing still. So, we’re going to have to do something.

ADAM CLIFTON

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So, by controlling levels of multi-generational debt load versus minimum guaranteed incomes on the bottom while allowing compounding to accelerate at the top, can be assured of a rich and successful future with stability, and everyone is free to live as according to their means. This is what my firm is suggesting, and feels this will be a likely future scenario.

[SLIDE 17] There may be some details to work out along the way, but what is clear is that current economic models are becoming obsolete, and we need to think of the next Really Great Thing – The Future.

In saying this, humanity must overcome its limits and launch our species into the future, where we deserve to be.

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Transitory Monuments, photo essay, 2015

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Transitory Monuments, photo essay, 2015

VIKRAM DIVECHA

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Thank you Mr Sugiarso When I returned Mr Sugiarso his question, he nonchalantly replied “I am in the business of ladies' underwear”. I was a little stumped at first. I followed by barraging him with questions. He went on to clarify each one. He did not stitch, design or manufacture undergarments. Had no experience as a tailor. Did not own a factory in a UAE free zone that was churning out underwear after underwear.

Instead, I learnt, Mr Sugiarso had a role in the circulation of ladies' undergarments, and in a rather invisible manner. He was employed by a re-exporting firm in Dubai that ships in containers full of cotton undergarments from Indonesia. Once they reach the UAE ports, he stores them in his company warehouse in a free zone, and diligently files all these undergarments into Excel sheets.

On receiving a purchase order from a buyer, he ships them to a new destination. His re-exports head across to the GCC, Middle East, Levant and beyond. Mr Sugiarso never gets to see these undergarments in question, never gets to wear them or touch them. Most often, these boxes full of undergarments are never unpacked in the UAE. They just take a stop gap in Dubai. After this sojourn they navigate through further trade nodes before reaching someone’s derriere. I met Mr Sugiarso at a realtor’s office, where we had a casual conversation. Despite my being aware of Dubai being such a busy global port, Mr Sugiarso that afternoon, in those few minutes, stripped down the process of re-exporting, a little too vividly for me. He spoke about volumes & movements, customs & processes, how goods came in and left. It was a lesson in how impatient our economy needs to be. Very quickly, he animated the image of boxes stacking and unstacking in my mind.

Around that time I photographed a series of images in Ras Al Khor, an industrial area in Dubai, where I happened to be one night. At that hour the machines and workforce of the area had come to a standstill. 14-wheel trailers were parked in long stretches. Giant shutters blocked access to

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warehouses. Streets were unclogged of traffic.

A few people were ambling around. I had never experienced such still in Ras Al Khor. All this made the anticipation for the hectic tomorrow evident to me. The photo essay I created was titled ‘Transitory monuments of Ras Al Khor Industrial area’. That night I hadn’t captured images, but had captured a temporary pause. This photo essay, an assignment for the Sheikha Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship and my brief chat with Mr Sugiaro, somewhere along, I suspect, sowed the seeds for the Warehouse Project.

The journey of the Warehouse Project was not impersonal as the box of undergarments. This situation wouldn’t have come around without the support of so many individuals and entities.

- Alserkal Avenue: Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, Vilma Jurkute, Tairone Bastien, Aquamarina Adonopoulou, Luay Al Derazi, Anthony Davies, Feras Attawna, Victoria Lelandais, Fiza Akram, Sayed Makhdoom, Stephen Kigoye, and team.

- Atiq Liusie General Trading LLC: Alywin Liusie, Laurent Lapietra, Sanju Rajan, Mohamad Latif and team.

- Tairone Bastien, Debra Levine, Murtaza Vali, Kevin Jones, Neha Vora, Gayatri Gopinath, Shaina Anand, Adam Clifton and Kevin Zucker.

- The Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, Tashkeel Critical Practice Programme and Campus Art Dubai.

- Pradeep Kumar, Jaisurya Kurup, Sumeshwar Sharma, Anthony Manalo, Anabelle De Gersigny, Umer Butt and Hetal Pawani.

- Haresh Chugani (Molden Trading LLC), Mohit Chugani, Mohit Daryani, Ammar Sorathia (Pronto Trading LLC), Shankar Bhagchandani (Al Taqdeer Al Rafia LLC), Deepak Bhagchandani, Nadeem Mukadam (M.H. Enterprises), Ajay Krishnan (Consolidated Shipping Group), Sasikala (SK), Syed Zeeshan Ahmed, Suku Sudhakaran (VAG

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shipping), Baber Jahangir (Fakhruddin Trading), Pratik Ariwala (Landmark Group), Krishandas P. (Earnest Insurance), Lokesh Shah (Elmec trading LLC), Mustafa (SMB trading LLC), Bose Cherian (Bismi Trading LLC), Shaukat, Unique Falcon LLC, and Ahmed Rauf (Jumeirah Beach Real Estate).

BIOGRAPHIES

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Vikram Divecha Vikram Divecha (born 1977, Beirut) is a Mumbaibred artist based in Dubai, UAE. His work addresses labour, time and value, interrogating specific environments and challenging socioeconomic structures. His practice has developed around what he calls “found processes” – those forces and capacities at work within state, social, economic and industrial spheres. These processes are his realm of intervention: Divecha introduces “glitches” or realigns a system, which in turn generates an altered, amplified outcome as the operation runs its course. Constantly negotiating for existing material, space and labour, he navigates communities in deepening dialogues with potential participants. The changes he initiates are not simply injected into a system and then showcased; rather, Divecha’s are slow processes, capable of enduring well beyond the time/space framework of what is “exhibited”, in some cases generating sustained social associations. By aligning himself to the system, working alongside participants, Divecha adapts his strategies as the project itself evolves.

Re-contextualising the ebb and flow of goods through a warehouse, re-framing agency among municipal gardeners who create lasting public works, injecting non-artists into an artistic space, and superintending the re-generation of context as uprooted bricks from a bus stop are re-laid elsewhere – such are the situations created across a practice invested far more in the social dynamics of an actual urban space, than in the hermetic world of the white cube. Despite interacting with largely invisible systems, his works have a definite materiality and formal rigour – a regimented plot of boulders, stylised hedges, stacks of boxes. His engagements translate into public art, sculptural installations, video and drawings.

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Divecha’s exhibitions include Domestic Affairs, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde (2016), Portrait Sessions, Tashkeel, Dubai (2016), Warehouse Project, Alserkal Programming Commission, Dubai (2016), White Cube... Literally, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai (2016), DUST, Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowsku Castle, Warsaw (2015), Accented, Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah (2015) and A Public Privacy, DUCTAC, Dubai (2015), among others. Recipient of the 2014 Middle East Emergent Artist Prize, he has also created projects for The Arab Fund For Arts and Culture's public art commission InVisible in 2014.

Tairone Bastien Tairone Bastien is the Programming Director at Alserkal Avenue, establishing a programme dedicated to supporting dialogue and production of performance, public art and social practice by emerging and mid-career artists living and working in the MENASA region. From 2011 – 2014, Tairone was Head of Public Engagement for TCA Abu Dhabi, where he shaped the public engagement strategy and programmes for the future museums of Saadiyat Island, as well as programming for Abu Dhabi Art and exhibitions at Manarat Al Saadiyat.

Before moving to the UAE, Tairone was a curator for Performa in New York from 2005 – 2010, where he organised performances, public artist commissions and interventions throughout the city, and coordinated with over 30 leading New York arts institutions as part of the first three Performa biennials. Born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, Tairone has a BA in Art History from the University of British Columbia and an MA in Curating from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York.

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Adam Clifton Adam Clifton has an MBA from the London Business School, and he served as an intern to Nobel Laureate Robert Solow in the 1980s. Before retirement in 2013, his work involved matters of technology, consumption, resources and labour policy. He has worked on projects with Accenture, Unilever, Apple, Bechtel, Dow, and Vattenfall, and has been a consultant to the Davos Economic Summit. He lives in Geneva, Switzerland where he is now an independent consultant on global macroeconomic policy.

Kevin Jones Kevin Jones is an independent arts writer based in Dubai. New York-born and Paris-bred, he has lived in the Middle East for the past 10 years and is currently the UAE Desk Editor for ArtAsiaPacific. He contributes regularly to The Art Newspaper, Artforum, ArtReview Asia and FlashArt International. Regionally, his writing has been published in Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia, Bidoun, Canvas, Brownbook and The National.

His blog, unfinishedperfect.com, devoted to fostering a critical voice on art in the Gulf region, is perpetually launching.

Debra Levine Debra Levine is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at NYU Abu Dhabi and is affiliated with The Hemispheric Institute for Politics and Performance, and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Department of Undergraduate Drama. Her work explores the intersection

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between performance, politics and new media/ digital humanities through the lens of feminist and queer theory, disability studies, and visual studies.

Debra has written on Jérôme Bel’s collaboration with Theater Hora of Disabled Theater for Studia Dramatica, as well as contributed articles to GLQ, Women and Performance, e-misférica, Theatre Research International, and The Disability Studies Quarterly. She also has chapters in two new books published in 2016, Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres and Burning Down the House: Downtown Film, Video and TV Culture: 1975-2001.

Murtaza Vali Murtaza Vali is a critic and curator based in Brooklyn, USA and Sharjah, UAE. A recipient of a 2011 Creative Capital, Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing, he regularly publishes in various international art periodicals and has contributed to publications for both commercial galleries and non-profit institutions globally. His past curatorial projects include: Formal Relations (Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York, 2015); Accented (Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, 2015); Geometries of Difference: New Approaches to Abstraction and Ornament (Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, 2015); PTSD: Shahpour Pouyan (Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai, 2014); extra | ordinary: The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013 (Art Dubai, 2013); Brute Ornament (Green Art Gallery, Dubai, 2012); and Accented (BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, 2010). He also edited Manual for Treason (2011), a multilingual publication commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation for Sharjah Biennial 10 and served on the selection jury for the 2010 Sharjah Art Foundation Production Programme grants. He is a Visiting Instructor at Pratt Institute and a Lead Tutor of Campus Art Dubai 4.0.

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Neha Vora Neha Vora is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, USA. Vora's research focuses on citizenship and belonging within the Gulf Arab states, particularly among South Asian diaspora populations. In addition to a number of journal articles, Vora is the author of Impossible Citizens: Dubai's Indian Diaspora, published in 2013 by Duke University Press. A recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, she is currently in Doha working on a project that investigates the impacts of knowledge economy transformation and American branch campus expansions on Qatar.

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P u b l i s h e d i n 2 0 1 7 i n c o n n e c t i o n w i t h Wa r e h o u s e Project (2016) by Vikram Divecha, a 2016 Alserkal P r o g r a m m i n g C o m m i s s i o n i n Wa r e h o u s e 8 2 , A l s e r k a l Av e n u e , f r o m 1 4 M a r c h t o 1 1 J u n e 2 0 1 6 .

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