Stephanie Rosenthal is leaving Gropius Bau in Berlin to head up the long-awaited Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum.
The German curator will run the in-development institution alongside Maisa Al Qassimi. Though Rosenthal won’t install any shows for at least another three years. The deal between the UAE capital and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York was struck in 2006, with building work on the Frank Gehry-designed institution initiated in 2011. That soon ground to a halt amidst claim and counterclaim regarding the working conditions involving the whole of the Saadiyat Island site, which is to feature several museums – including Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Gulf Labor Coalition (GLC), a group of artists and activists that has been advocating for migrant worker rights in the Gulf since 2010, called for a boycott of the Guggenheim over what it said were systematic violations of labour laws. The Guggenheim denied the accusations.
The museum’s proposed opening date of 2017 was then pushed back again, but the Guggenheim says that the construction of the 42,000 sqm exhibition space is now back on track for a 2025 inauguration.
Rosenthal will have considerably more real estate to deal with than in Berlin, where last year she used Gropius Bau’s 6,500 sqm to stage exhibitions, among others, by Otobong Nkanga and Zheng Bo. Both shows tackled ideas of humanity’s relationship to nature, exploitative extraction processes, structures of repair and ‘how plants practice politics’. They built on themes already visited by Rosenthal back in 2016 – the advancement of technology, dispossession and displacement – when she curated the Sydney Biennale.
Rosenthal was previously chief curator of the Hayward Gallery in London.
