Creative Culture Making: Policy Directions for Arts Sector Development in Bahrain
Abstract
Despite a storied history of artmaking, Bahrain’s arts sector currently exists in a state of arrested development. A recurring explanation for this posits that the country’s small population is simply unable to yield a sizable arts market and industry. By engaging arts sector stakeholders to contextualize the current state, this study proves otherwise. Analyzing arts sector governance, environmental conditions, and artmakers’ ways of working through a systems lens reveals a lack of active development processes, along with an amalgam of challenges that span across sociocultural, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical boundaries. In their totality, these challenges impair Bahrain’s creative value chain, thereby nullifying Bahraini society’s ability to engage in bottom-up creative culture making processes. This report seeks to inform cultural policymaking by uncovering challenges and distinguishing between fundamental and symptomatic issues. Moreover, it identifies openings for change, and proposes a set of alternative policy directions aimed at transitioning Bahrain’s arts sector towards a state conducive to its flourishing.
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My master’s thesis set out to inform cultural policymaking in Bahrain by developing a systems-level understanding of the country’s arts sector and how individuals within it operate. I settled on this topic after reflecting on disconnects within my own identity as a Bahraini – and after recognising that Bahraini creative work has, over time, lost its ability to diffuse into and thereby shape contemporary popular culture.
I spent a year conducting field research in Bahrain (2020-2021), interviewing both artmakers as well as decision makers across governmental entities. To my knowledge, it is the only study in the region that analyses the sector through the lens of system dynamics. I would also argue that it is the only study that builds upon and validates the lived experience of Bahrain’s artmakers.
Undertaking this study spurred in me many realisations that altered my worldview (and that also broke me). First, the realisation that in Bahrain, processes of bottom-up culture making are constricted systemically and by design*. Second, that the Bahraini arts sector exists soley to serve decorative purposes and to perpetuate State-apprroved narratives. And finally, that my country and people are undergoing culture death.
(*Note: Instances of bottom-up culture making do take place in Bahrain; albeit in small pockets within primarily low-income areas which for decades have been undergoing processes of erasure and slummification.)