Emirati free speech activist Ahmed Mansoor, left, with artist and reporter Molly Crabapple (photo via Instagram/mollycrabapple)

Artist Molly Crabapple has just published an extensive report on the conditions on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, where franchises of the Louvre of the Guggenheim museums will open in the coming years. Reporting for Vice, she explores the conditions of workers, but unlike most reports, she focuses on efforts by workers to better their situations even when confronting massive obstacles.

“While workers may be lied to and forced to live and work in brutal conditions, they also — improbably — are fighting back,” she writes.

“Abu Dhabi is the most censored country I’ve ever done journalism in,” Crabapple told Hyperallergic about her Vicearticle. “The royal family are eager consumers of American spyware, communications are monitored, and undercover police swarm workers’ gathering areas. A worker was grabbed by undercover police for speaking with me, something for which I will feel guilt forever. With the exception of a previously imprisoned dissident, no one on any level of society could speak frankly with me, for fear of deportation, arrest, or professional consequences. Workers’ salaries are brutally low, but more problematic is the complete ban on labor activity — strikes, unions, or workers’ councils. While Western institutions like NYU consider themselves zones of intellectual freedom, the arrest of a Sorbonne lecturer in 2012 for pro-democracy activity makes me skeptical of their claims.”....Continue Reading

> via Hyperallergic