March Meeting 2015: (Day 4) Memories Of Our Underdevelopment, A Symposium—Discussions Curated By Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri

The final day of the March Meeting 2015 talks were marred by absence. Ayreen Anastas, one of the artist-duo curating the day’s discussions, had become ill the night before. Her partner in curatorial crime, Rene Gabri, was able to muster a few hours for the talks before he was called to her hospital bedside. The pair had united a panel of diverse thinkers and artists to fuel the day, yet two of these participants were themselves absent: Ashok Sukumaran of artist collective CAMP, a Gulf Labor member, who was denied a United Arab Emirates visa; and artist Walid Raad, who had been expected by the artist-organizers despite being unannounced on the official program. During his brief time at the symposium’s helm, Gabri evoked the previous night’s screening of his and Anastas’ film, memories of our underdevelopment (2015), foregrounding how the cinematic piece spotlights “places not on the map”—most notably unrecognized bedouin villages in Israel’s Naqab. As the speakers—who remained largely un-introduced to the wider audience and their fields of expertise made evident only when they took the floor—succumbed to the leader-less, freeform exchange of ideas that ensued, it seemed like we, too, were suddenly somewhere “off the map,” set adrift in a suspended discursive space. Here in Sharjah—under the auspices of a local art foundation with a long history of bringing people together—voices from the Occupy movement, the Gezi resistance from Turkey and Gulf Labor mingled with those of worldwide thinkers to take hard stabs at big, societal issues. Struggle after struggle—rights-less South Asian workers in the UAE, global discrimination between the “backward” and modern peoples, the complicity of contemporary art in neo-liberal processes—the discussions advanced in fits and starts to conclude with the promise of . . . further discussions. 

• United Arab Emirates