On December 7th Bidoun’s Negar Azimi will join William Wells, Director of Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, and Glenn D. Lowry, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, in a sprawling conversation about the arts in the swiftly changing Middle East. Azimi will narrate the various and vexed issues related to the production of Bidoun #25, made in Cairo.

Tickets and more information here.

May 22 – August 14, 2011
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 22, 4-6 pm
The Big One: Live music performance by Hassan Khan, May 22, 5:15pm
Queens Museum of Art

On the occasion of the opening of his video installation The Hidden Location (May 22, 4:30pm), Bidoun contributing editor Hassan Khan will perform his music set The Big One (2009), a 45 minute piece made up of oscillating juxtapositions of heavy synth-based New Wave Shaabi music with delicately wrought tonal compositions. The exhibition is curated by Queens Museum of Art Van Lier Fund Fellow — and fellow Bidoun contributing editor — Sohrab Mohebbi.

In addition, on May 20, 7-9 pm, after a screening of selected single channel videos, the artist will discuss the work on view at e-flux, 41 Essex St, New York.

Art in General
Tuesday, October 12 at 6:30 pm
79 Walker Street
New York, NY

“Babak Radboy is the Eddie Murphy of the Interview magazine of the Middle East”
— Jahan Al Dessari

Bidoun Creative Director Babak Radboy will be speaking tonight at Art in General as part of ArteEast‘s Across Histories Lecture Series.

New Museum (5th Floor)
August 4 — September 26, 2010
235 Bowery
New York, NY

The Bidoun Library Project at the New Museum is a highly partial account of five decades of printed matter in, near, about, and around the Middle East. Arrayed along these shelves are pulp fictions and propaganda, monographs and guidebooks, and pamphlets and periodicals, on subjects ranging from the oil boom to the Dubai bust, the Cold War to the hot pant, Pan-Arabs to Black Muslims, revolutionaries to royals, and Orientalism to its opposites.

Most of the 700-odd titles on display were acquired specifically for this exhibition. The shape of the collection was dictated primarily by search terms on the World Wide Web rather than any intrinsic notion of aptness or excellence. Searching for “Arab,” “paperback,” “1970s,” and “<$3,” we acquired dozens of books about the Oil Crisis, the cruel love of the Sheikh, and the lifestyles of the nouveau riche. A similar search for “Iran” produced its own set of types and stereotypes. We did not set out to find the best books about, say, the Iranian revolution; in a sense, we looked for the worst. Or, rather, we tried to look at what was there.

The result is less a coherent group of titles or texts than an assortment of books as things, sorted roughly into four themes or units. Catalogues hang from the ceiling in front of each shelf cluster. Inside is a documentation of a selection of books from that shelf, in dialogue with excerpted texts and images from the library as a whole.

The Bidoun Library includes a program of Iranian film, video, and television culled from low-fidelity DVDs and VHS tapes that circulate among Iranians in the Diaspora. The selection includes post-revolutionary variety shows, music videos, and other totems of middlebrow—unibrow?—culture. This is an Iranian cinema unlikely to be shown at Lincoln Center.

New Museum (5th Floor)
August 4 — September 26, 2010
235 Bowery
New York, NY

The Bidoun Library Project at the New Museum is a highly partial account of five decades of printed matter in, near, about, and around the Middle East. Arrayed along these shelves are pulp fictions and propaganda, monographs and guidebooks, and pamphlets and periodicals, on subjects ranging from the oil boom to the Dubai bust, the Cold War to the hot pant, Pan-Arabs to Black Muslims, revolutionaries to royals, and Orientalism to its opposites.

Most of the 700-odd titles on display were acquired specifically for this exhibition. The shape of the collection was dictated primarily by search terms on the World Wide Web rather than any intrinsic notion of aptness or excellence. Searching for “Arab,” “paperback,” “1970s,” and “<$3,” we acquired dozens of books about the Oil Crisis, the cruel love of the Sheikh, and the lifestyles of the nouveau riche. A similar search for “Iran” produced its own set of types and stereotypes. We did not set out to find the best books about, say, the Iranian revolution; in a sense, we looked for the worst. Or, rather, we tried to look at what was there.

The result is less a coherent group of titles or texts than an assortment of books as things, sorted roughly into four themes or units. Catalogues hang from the ceiling in front of each shelf cluster. Inside is a documentation of a selection of books from that shelf, in dialogue with excerpted texts and images from the library as a whole.

The Bidoun Library includes a program of Iranian film, video, and television culled from low-fidelity DVDs and VHS tapes that circulate among Iranians in the Diaspora. The selection includes post-revolutionary variety shows, music videos, and other totems of middlebrow—unibrow?—culture. This is an Iranian cinema unlikely to be shown at Lincoln Center.

Provisions II is the second volume of the catalog for Sharjah Biennial 9 co-published by Sharjah Art Foundation and Bidoun. The book features contributions in the form of artist’s projects and diaries from Yazan Khalili, Doug Henders, Lawrence Weiner, Ana Vidigal, Sophia Al-Maria, Ziad Antar, Nika Oblak & Primoz Novak, Sherene Seikaly, Sophie Ernst, Shumon Basar, Fernando Jose Pereira, Kaelin Wilson-Goldie, Liliana Porter, Nida Sinnokrot, Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, Basma Al Sharif, Mona El-Mousfy, Clare Davies, Ayşe Erkmen and Isabel Carlos.

Buy now for $40 or as a set with Provisions I for $60.

Bidoun will miss Robert Shapazian, who passed away in June. Robert was the founding director of the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, where he worked for ten years. He was also, in the time we knew him, a great supporter of Bidoun and a friend to us all. Though Robert was a fixture in the art world, he remained deeply skeptical, relentlessly ironic, and detached from its excesses. The result was the stuff of great comedy. We will miss him dearly.

Read Robert Shapazian in conversation with Anna Boghiguian from Bidoun #08, Interviews.

The show will feature works and acts by Dora Garcia, Sharon Hayes, Johanna Billing, Johan Svensson, Nikos Arvanitis, Sarah Pierce, Miklos Erhardt + Little Warsaw, the Complaints Choir in addition to Bidoun Video 2010 with programmes curated by Bidoun and guest curators Masoud Amralla Al Ali, Aram Moshayedi, and the duo of Özge Ersoy and Sohrab Mohebbi.

More information at Art Agenda