Written by Georgina Adam Saturday, 29 October 2011 00:02

The New Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Now On Hold

Abu Dhabi.- Construction of the vast, 24,000 sq. m Guggenheim Museum planned for Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi has been put on hold after the emirate decided to recall the tender for the concrete works. The museum, designed by the US architect Frank Gehry, is one of four new institutions planned for a cultural district on the island. The Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC) has told the 11 contractors who submitted bids that it is returning the money—AED20,000 ($5,444)—they paid as part of the tender process. According to the online Middle Eastern business site MEED, the contractors—from as far afield as South Africa, South Korea and Canada—submitted bids for the AED400m (£68m) package in March this year. The museum was originally aiming for a 2013 opening, but recently this date was revised to 2015, according to a spokeswoman for TDIC. The company also said that the work will be retendered at a future date.

According to TDIC, however, the museum is not being cancelled. The state-owned entity issued a statement saying: “Due to a review of its project procurement strategy, Tourism Development & Investment (TDIC) has recalled the concrete works tender of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum.” But it said that “construction of the museum has started”, that land reclamation and design of the seawall have been completed, and that “the art collection continues to grow”. A maelstrom of rumours has been swirling around Abu Dhabi for months that the Saadiyat Island project was slowing. Asked by The Art Newspaper about these on 11 October, Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong admitted that there was a slow-down in the project, due to a review ordered by the rulers. “It is going ahead but slower,” said Armstrong, who added: “But I don’t always know everything that is going on there.” Asked about other rumours that architects had not been paid and were walking off the job, he said that that these rumours were untrue. Contacted by The Art Newspaper, Jean Nouvel’s office confirmed that there was no problem with payments for the project for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, another of the museums planned for the island.


According to the museum's own website, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will be a pre-eminent platform for global contemporary art and culture that will present the most important artistic achievements of our time. Through its permanent collection, exhibitions, scholarly publications and educational programs, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will promote a truly transnational perspective on art history. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will move beyond a definition of global art premised on geography by focusing on the interconnected dynamics of local, regional, and international art centers as well as their diverse historical contexts and sources of creative inspiration. In realizing this endeavor, the museum will acknowledge and celebrate the specific identity derived from the cultural traditions of Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates, as well as other countries comprising the Middle East, even as it pioneers a novel, visionary model that will redefine the art-historical canon. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will build a permanent collection, organize exhibitions, generate scholarship and undertake educational programs that will examine the history of art produced around the world since circa 1965 from a variety of perspectives.



The permanent collection display and temporary exhibitions will both recognize unique contributions to art history and underscore the interconnected dynamics and fundamentally transnational nature of contemporary art practice. Major art-historical movements will be surveyed through the lens of a transnational understanding of world cultures. A dynamic program of changing exhibitions will explore common themes, formal affinities, and other key relationships among the work of artists across time and geography. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will invite artists to produce site-specific commissions for dedicated galleries, select exterior locations, and the iconic cones that will circle the museum. In addition, the museum will be a catalyst for scholarship in a variety of fields, chief among them the history of art in the Middle East in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is being developed in collaboration with The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation which, since its founding in 1937, has promoted the understanding and appreciation of art, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods.Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.guggenheim.org/abu-dhabi

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