TIME IS PLACE
Olafur Eliasson, Shadows Travelling on the Sea of the Day, 2022
From inside the chilled hotel room the scene is postcard perfect. Palm trees, decorously arranged like chorus girls for a Hollywood musical along manicured lawns, verdant landscaped gardens and beyond them white yachts in the harbour, conjure a scene recognisable as Monaco, Nice or Miami. But open the door and step onto the small balcony on the other side of the triple glazing and the combined effect of 38 degree heat and 100% humidity (it’s October) slaps you in the face. Confabulated 5-star hotel fantasy of the magazine-page variety meets the hard facts of geography.
I am in Doha, Qatar, the small kingdom on the Arabian Peninsula which has access to the world’s largest confirmed reservoir of natural gas in the world, just offshore in the Persian Gulf. Qatar is about to host FIFA’s World Cup Finals – by the time you read this the eyes of the world will have been on it for weeks. I am here for a fashion and culture event a few weeks before it kicks off.
Doha is home to “Museum Island” an arts district located on its harbour, presenting the city and the kingdom to the world like a carefully curated shop window and crowned at its tip by the Museum of Islamic Art by I. M. Pei (arguably his finest work). It hosts what must be one of the most densely concentrated collections of cultural institutions in the world. A collection of collections so to speak, with something of everything. The island boasts museums, libraries and world- class stadia by no less than 11 Pritzker Prize-winning architects; the who’s who of the architectural super-league. If the method (known as the Bilbao effect after the regeneration of the Basque backwater propelled to international fame thanks to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim) isn’t original, the scale sure is.
The well-established trend of gentrifying neglected areas through the use of culture, such as the Tate Modern in London, Strelka in Moscow or Highline in New York, is one thing – building brand new global hubs for trade, travel, and culture from a scrap of baked earth is quite another. Through a decade-long acquisition of art – from traditional antiquities to contemporary work and everything in between, in what is reputedly the largest collecting programme of its kind – the result is bewildering and impressive.
The latest addition to this ever-expanding cultural programme is a new public sculpture by Olafur Eliasson an hour’s drive from Doha, called Shadows Travelling on the Sea of the Day. The work itself is stunning and soulful. The artist, who is best known for The Weather Project, a glowing sun at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, has a line in creating visceral experiences that position man against the sublime majesty of nature. His work reiterates the insignificance, fragility and temporality of humanity versus nature’s enduring beauty, power and casual indifference to our existence. The sculpture’s title is a clue about the subtext of the work – the nature of time as experienced in the desert. The knitting together of sky and earth is as sublime as its location in Qatar is troubling.
A week before my departure, at a reception in Knightsbridge, amidst another fretful conversation about the state of the UK’s democracy, a close friend was “frankly appalled” at me for going. The reason for his objection is that the Kingdom of Qatar is one of the countries in which homosexual practices are illegal and it actively persecutes gay people. On the morning of our arrival Peter Tatchell the British LGBTQ+ activist was stopped by Qatari police for making a one-man demonstration, holding up a sign objecting to Qatar’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people. Furthermore, migrant workers regularly die on construction projects in Qatar. Since the Kingdom was awarded the right to host the World Cup the Guardian has recorded the deaths of more than 6,750 migrant workers, as of February 2021; Qatar put the official number of deaths at World Cup construction sites at 37, of which only three were “work related”.
The noisy atmosphere of a cocktail party isn’t really suitable for an adequate and nuanced response to these dark and complex political realities, underpinned by the West’s reliance on Qatari gas, and markets in thrall to Qatari capital. At the same time, the chattering class seems far more eager to point out what it sees as the barbaric cruelty of this Oriental nation than they are to elevate the voices of local activists, or, it should be said, to look at painful realities closer to home, such as asking why there is an outbreak of typhoid in the overcrowded Manston Asylum Centre in Kent.
The Western perspective is that modernity and progress are an adjunct of Western definitions of human rights. The non-Western perspective is that imposing these ideals on societies is a form of neo-colonial imposition, and that there are multiple Modernities rather than a single Western Modernism. It should be possible to find alternatives to this dichotomy.
In fact, this question is at the core of the dispute around international relations following the collapse of colonialism. After the fall of empire, colonists sought to establish a post- colonial order in which the economic subjugation of newly independent countries carried on as before. This echoed the abolition of slavery in the US in which freed slaves saw only a marginal improvement in their economic condition despite their nominal political emancipation. Wage slavery could be just as harsh as regular slavery.
The myth of progress consigns these societies to “backwardness”. They are like audience members who, having arrived late at the theatre of progress, are missing the plot and need to be updated to catch up with the narrative of advanced civilisation. Except that no matter how long the play goes on certain folks are not only behind the times but will never “catch up”. The post-colonial dispensation from the point of view of the global south is nothing other than the continuation of colonialism by other means. Development theory is a replacement for race theory.
For Qatar, the hope is that major cultural and sporting events like the World Cup Finals are transforming the perception of the world about them. This ambition isn’t without precedent. In 1964, Japan successfully announced its post-war identity on the global stage at the Tokyo Summer Olympics. “Witches of the Orient” (see the wonderful documentary on Amazon Prime) maps the shifting perception of the Japanese as a defeated people to a nation of high ambition capable of anything – even winning at volleyball, a sport designed by and for tall Europeans. Similarly the amazing opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics of 2008 heralded the Chinese Wirtschaftswunder.
The extraordinary league of robed gentlemen building futuristic skyscrapers on the southern shores of the Persian Gulf can claim to be among the great architects of the 21st century. Some of these projects work, some of them don’t. Just like the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age, these new nation builders aren’t all lovely people. Some indeed are murderous monsters who chop up journalists in their embassies. Many of their plans are mirages that will vanish alongside vast sums of money. Among the well-publicised, grandiose schemes that have already failed spectacularly is the famous Dubai World real-estate development of artificial islands which was marketed with the help of celebrities like David Beckham. The next one to unravel surely is the Neom project which recently broke ground in Saudi Arabia. The gullible globalist airheads who once claimed Dubai to be the vision of the future may not have been totally wrong after all. Except Dubai’s export to the future isn’t an expansion of air-conditioned glass-covered cities with flying taxis but the transformation of Western democracies into oligarchic sheikdoms.
In Dubai-on-Thames palm trees are hard to spot and our new sheikh is garbed in a tailored suit by Henry Herbert. This year has been truly remarkable for the UK; we have had three PMs, from the bizarre Brexit buffoon to a very stupid version of the ghost of Mrs Thatcher. This time the grown-ups in the room (money men in the City of London) have dispensed with the perfunctory pretense of democracy and crowned one of their own, a man twice as rich as the new king. Rishi Sunak is a market fundamentalist and a champion of the very austerity that has delivered us the current mess. This doubling down by the dominant elites in Europe is magnificently mapped by the economist Clara E. Mattei in her new book The Capital Order, which finds the political class walking mindlessly as zombies down a path she recognises to be the road to fascism.
One of the benefits of travel is gaining a better view of home, if you dare to look back. Travel writers have been often blamed for – and frequently found guilty of – arriving in places with too many preconceived ideas. Just as you pack your bags with suntan lotion and sandals, hoping for sunshine only to find snow, it’s fine to travel clutching your moral codes and values, but do please leave behind a world view framed at home. The destination may have other ideas. Masoud Golsorkhi