New York Times:

On May 11, the Lebanese artist Walid Raad was turned away at the airport when he tried to enter the United Arab Emirates, where the government is making a big investment in art with the Saadiyat Island project. The project, in the capital, Abu Dhabi, will include branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim as well as a campus of New York University.

Mr. Raad, who teaches at Cooper Union in New York, says he heard an Emirates immigration officer say that he was being turned away for security reasons.

The previous week, the Mumbai-based artist Ashok Sukumaran was denied a visa to enter the United Arab Emirates for undefined “security reasons.”

Others recently denied entry to the country on the vague pretext of security reasons include Andrew Ross, a New York University professor who has been fiercely critical of labor abuses on Saadiyat Island, and the journalist Sean O’Driscoll, who last year co-wrote a New York Times article on harsh labor conditions at the Abu Dhabi campus...

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