Bidoun #28 INTERVIEWS features conversations among Giorgio Agamben, Sophia Al-Maria, Hossein Amanat, Negar Azimi, Omar Berrada, Leland de la Durantaye, Jeremy Deller, Mona Eltahawy, Lisa Farjam, Yasmine El Rashidi, Larry Gagosian, Conner Habib, Yasmine Hamdan, Zahi Hawass, Michelle Kuo, Ursula Lindsey, Navid Negahban, Sukhdev Sandhu, Anna Della Subin, Benjamin Tiven, Michael C. Vazquez and Marina Warner.
The Independent
March 7 – 10, 2013
548 West 22nd Street, New York
http://www.independentnewyork.com
Bidoun is cleaning out overstock!
Visit us on the roof of the Independent and enjoy a free back issue!
Sunday, January 27 at 4pm
MoMA/PS1
4601 21st Street, Long Island City, NY 11101
Free with museum admission
Join the Facebook event
A screening of Jack Kevorkian’s public access television program The Door (30 min); presented by Anna Della Subin
A screening of Shridhar Bapat’s video feedback fantasia Aleph Null (12 min, 1971); presented by Alexander Keefe
Sex talk and group consciousness exercises;presented by Conner Habib
Plus: Transcendental listening in the dome
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Jack Kevorkian
Dr. Jack Kevorkian — also known as Dr. Death — was a pathologist, euthanasia activist, poet, composer and instrumentalist. In Bidoun #27 (Diaspora), Anna Della Subin told the profoundly strange story of this child of genocide survivors through his curiously compelling paintings. Here, Subin will introduce The Door, a public access TV show on the nature of consciousness and some “very hazy realms of human existence,” which Kevorkian produced, wrote, and hosted in California in the early 1980s.
Shridhar Bapat
In the late 1960s Shridhar Bapat was a key figure in the emerging video scene. The first video curator at The Kitchen in its most freewheeling period and the “finest feedback camera turner in New York City,” Bapat worked on the New York Avant Garde Festivals, the first Women’s Video Festival, Shirley Clarke’s TeePee Video Space Troupe, and many of Nam June Paik’s major installations before falling out of the scene to live underground; he died, homeless, in 1990. Alexander Keefe reconstructed Bapat’s story in Bidoun #27 (Diaspora). Keefe will be presenting a rare screening of Aleph Null, one of Bapat’s original video compositions — “all these mandalas going all over the place,” in Bapat’s words — created with Charles Phillips in 1971. First shown at the Whitney Museum’s 1971 “Video Tape Special,” Aleph Null was last screened at the Mudd Club in 1981.
Conner Habib
Conner Habib is a writer, philosopher, sex advice columnist, and gay porn star, based in San Francisco. An adherent of Rudolph Steiner’s Anthroposophy, Habib lectures on the Western esoteric tradition. He has been featured in such films as Man Up, Night Maneuvers, and Arabesque 2: From Tales of the Arabian Nights; his essay, “The Virtues of Being an Object,” appeared in Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness, edited by Daniel Pinchbeck & Ken Jordan. Anna Della Subin’s conversation with Habib is forthcoming in Bidoun #28 (Interviews).
We are really pleased to announce Bidoun is the proud recipient of a generous grant from the Kindle Project Fund of the Common Council Foundation. The Kindle Project supports “creative thinkers, artists, activists, doers, and paradigm pushers.” It is kind donations like this as well as gifts from individuals and the support from our subscribers that enables us to continue our work.
December 15, 2012 — February 15, 2013
Point Centre for Contemporary Art
Megaron Hadjisavva,
2, Evagorou Street,
1057, Nicosia, Cyprus
For this Cypriot iteration of the Bidoun Library, we are presenting a thematic version of the Library built around espionage, the legacies of state-sponsored publishing, and the cultural Cold War. A site-specific subsection will be built around the assassination of the Egyptian writer Yussef el Sebai — himself the General Secretary of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Movement among many other roles — at the Hilton Hotel in Nicosia on February 18, 1978.
Friday Late: Record, Reframe, Resist
Friday November 30, 2012 from 6:30 – 10pm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL
This Friday evening at the V&A in London, as part of its ongoing investigation of lost and/or neglected cultural artifacts, Bidoun will be presenting a selection of trailers from the little known genre of Iranian-American “B Movies.” Produced mainly in Los Angeles in the years after the revolution, these resolutely un-canonical (and often un-watchable) low budget films feature mainly American casts with a few Iranian actors. They are the direct descendents of filmfarsi, the vernacular B Movie genre that dominated popular Iranian cinema before 1979, and which employed many of the same directors. Of course, with their new locale, language, and themes, much was lost in translation. These films — unlike their Iranian predecessors — have very limited potential for popular appeal.
And yet some of these films were exported to the Third World; others have become cult hits among pulp connoisseurs. Seen together, they shape a bizarre picture of what these diasporic directors once imagined the formula for a successful Hollywood action film to be — including confusing representations of self (ambiguous Middle Eastern villains, terrorists, and belly dancers in varying states of veiling) and hilariously outmoded and offensive representations of others (Arabs, Japanese, African Americans, women).
Wednesday, October 24th – Sunday, November 4th, 2012
Miguel Abreu Gallery
36 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002
Bidoun is pleased to be participating in Book Week II: In Translation, with Collages by Raha Raissnia, presented by Miguel Abreu Gallery and Sequence Press. The gallery floor will be arranged as a bookshop and reading room with recent titles from mostly local publishers. In addition, selections will be on hand from the Lower East Side Heritage Collection, a unique archive of specialized, noncirculating books at the Seward Park branch of the New York Public Library. Participants include:
Archipelago
Bidoun
Dalkey Archive Press
Halmos
New York Review Books
Open Letter Books
Seven Stories Press
Verso
New York Public Library’s Lower East Side Heritage Collection
See press release for more information
Michael Rakowitz and Robert Christgau in conversation
+ Launch of the record Sabreen — Live in Jerusalem 2010
Wednesday, October 17, 2012, 7pm
Lombard Freid Gallery
518 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
Lombard Freid Gallery is pleased to present an evening with artist Michael Rakowitz and legendary rock critic Robert Christgau, discussing the breakup of The Beatles as history and as metaphor, inspired by Rakowitz’s “The Breakup”—a set of works that includes radio broadcasts, film, a live concert in Jerusalem, memorabilia, and a deluxe limited edition LP produced in conjunction with Bidoun Projects.
The evening will be hosted by Sukhdev Sandhu, director of the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University and author of the lead essay in the liner notes for Live In Jerusalem 2010, which will be on sale at the event and from Bidoun.
Michael Rakowitz’s “The Breakup” was originally commissioned for The Jerusalem Show IV by Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem.
The 45min video of The Breakup will screen at 6pm.
Longtime Village Voice writer-editor Robert Christgau has covered popular music for many publications, including Esquire, Newsday, Creem, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Blender. His “Rock & Roll &” column appears monthly in the Barnes and Noble Review and his “Expert Witness” blog twice weekly at msn.com. Michael Rakowitz is an artist based in Chicago and New York City. His work has appeared in venues worldwide including P.S. 1, the Museum of Modern Art, MassMOCA, Tate Modern, the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Sharjah Biennial 8, Asian Art Biennial, and, most recently, dOCUMENTA (13) . His work is in many private and public collections including MoMA, UNESCO in Paris, and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago.
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