July 12 – September 17, 2011
Literacy expert, Dr. Frank Laubach, works late into the night on Afghan reading primers (March 1951). Here, he sits on a table to make the most of the lone lightbulb in his dim hotel room.
This summer, the Bidoun Library will be in residence at the Serpentine Gallery with a program of exhibitions, talks, screenings and an Egyptian shaabi wedding/dance party. Founded in 2009, the Bidoun Library is a peripatetic resource of books, periodicals and ephemera developed by Bidoun Projects, a not-for-profit publishing, curatorial and educational initiative dedicated to supporting contemporary culture from the Middle East.
In London, amid library closings and deaccessionings that have let thousands of publications loose upon the market, the Bidoun Library will address that crisis, as well as the printed aftermatter of the Egyptian revolution that began in earnest on January 25, 2011.
Months of research, purchasing and hoarding have amassed a collection of (nearly) every book printed and every newspaper and periodical founded since the revolution began — from soap-operatic novellas about Hosni Mubarak’s last days in power, to special revolution issues of teen, fitness, and in-flight magazines, as well as previously-banned political treatises. This material, along with publications obtained in London during Bidoun’s residency at the Centre for Possible Studies on Edgware Road, will be placed amongst the Library’s eclectic catalogue of guidebooks, political treatises, romance novels, comic books, travelogues, and oil company publications — a veritable cornucopia of representation.
Bidoun 25 — the issue that will launch at the Serpentine this summer — also considers the revolution in Egypt (and the volume of words it occasioned, in print and online), in what may well be the most information-dense Bidoun ever in history.
During July and August, Bidoun will host a series of events bringing together leading writers and artists:
Saturday, July 16
Hisham Matar
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm
Author of In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance, Hisham Matar was born in New York City in 1970 to Libyan parents, Matar spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. He has lived in the UK since 1986.
Monday, July 18
Rania Stephan: The Three Disappearances of Suad Hosni
The Gate Cinema, Notting Hill, 7pm
Former Edgware Road Project artist-in-residence Rania Stephan returns to present the UK premiere of her film The Three Disappearances of Suad Hosni (2011), which recently won the Sharjah Biennial Prize. The film’s non-fiction narrative reflects on the life and death of Egyptian actress Suad Hosni, who committed suicide while living on Edgware Road in 2001.
Friday, July 22
Shaabi-Music-Wedding-Dance-Party
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 8pm
Bidoun Projects present an evening of loud Egyptian Shaabi music, dancing, readings, and an actual wedding, all at the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011. This event is commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery as part of the Edgware Road Project.
Saturday, July 23
Nawal Al Saadawi
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm
Author of over forty-seven books, Nawal Al Saadawi is a pioneering Egyptian activist, psychiatrist, feminist, and political activist. Her books include Women and Sex, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, and God Dies by the Nile. Saadawi’s life in struggle has seen her incarcerated in the 1970s for speaking out against the corruption of the Sadat regime, forced by Islamists to flee Egypt for eight years in the 1990s. She was among the protesters in Tahrir Square in 2011.
Saturday, July 30
Samandal: Picture Stories From Here and There
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm
Samandal is a Beirut-based trilingual magazine dedicated to comics, cartoons, and other picture stories. The goal of Samandal is to provide a platform on which graphic artists from Lebanon, the Middle East, and the world may experiment with various combinations of word and image for the benefit of a polyglot international audience… that loves comics.
Saturday, August
6
Slavs and Tatars: Molla Nasreddin, The Magazine That Woud’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm
Artist collective Slavs and Tatars present Molla Nasreddin: The Magazine that Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve, a new book examining the history of that legendary Azeribaijani periodical, arguably the most important Muslim satirical political magazine of the 20th century. For the book’s UK launch, Slavs and Tatars will present Molla Nasreddin: Embrace Your Antithesis, including: a discussion of the book’s historical context; a case study of the complex Caucasus region; and an exploration of the issue of self-censorship, then and now. Guests will be offered their choice of red or white tea, alluding to Communism and Islam, the two major geopolitical narratives between which Molla Nasreddin — and Slavs and Tatars — navigate.
Saturday, August 13
Michael C. Vazquez
: The Periodical Cold War: Tales from the Bidoun Library
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm
In the 1960s, an array of state-sponsored international magazines fought pitched battles — against imperialism or communism and/or their own governments — across the entire length of the first, second, and third worlds. Bidoun Senior Editor and librarian Michael C. Vazquez presents an illustrated lecture on pivotal moments in periodical diplomacy, with especial focus on Transition (Kampala, Uganda), Tricontinental (Havana, Cuba), and Lotus: Afro-Asian Writing (Cairo / Beirut / Tunis).
Saturday, August 20
Ahdaf Soueif
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm
Based in London and Cairo, Ahdaf Soueif is a critic, activist, translator, and novelist whose works include In the Eye of the Sun, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground and The Map of Love. Winner of the 2010 Mahmoud Darwish Award for her work on Palestine, Soueif comes from a family of activists and writers who have been some of the key protagonists of the Egyptian revolution. In this seminar on writing and the revolution, Soueif will be discussing her work and sharing her experiences of activism and authorship over the past two decades.
Saturday, August 27
UK Libraries: Struggles for the Knowledge Commons
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm
A panel of leading activists reflect on the current struggles around the closing of public libraries in the UK.
Saturday, September 3
Sonallah Ibrahim
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm
In 2003, Sonallah Ibrahim — the author of Zaat, Stealth, The Smell of It, and The Committee, among other books — publicly refused a prestigious literary award given to him by the Egyptian ministry of culture. It was only the latest inspiring outrage from this novelist and writer, who’d been imprisoned for five years under the Nasser regime for his leftist politics. Ibrahim remains an outspoken critic and force of legend in Egypt.
Amsterdam Art/Book Fair
14 & 15 May 2011
Bidoun presentation Sunday May 15 at 2pm
Bidoun will be on display this weekend as part of Shashin Art Bookshop‘s table in addition to a presentation by Tiffany Malakooti on the Bidoun Library and BubuWeb projects.
For more information visit: http://www.amsterdamartbookfair.com
May 11, 2011
The Bidoun Library is seeking manifestations of the Revolution of January 25th in magazines, newspapers, books, and miscellaneous printed matter. We do not seek a complete and democratic collection of everything printed just ahead, during and after the 25th, nor of the best, most insightful, or lucid accounts in print, but printed materials which are more than anything else OBJECTS, necessitated, transformed or intervened upon by the continuing revolution.
In our experience, this approach tends to produce two types of documents: first, there are materials which are produced to meet new needs or markets among the public, or by new channels of distribution and socialization opened by an event. In general these are materials that would not have existed before these events and may not exist after. This could include newspapers and leaflets produced in, during, and for the demonstrators in Tahrir, for example, or hastily produced commemorative magazine issues or books produced directly after.
Another prime site of the material manifestation of an event often appears in the ways it is refracted in existing modes of cultural production. For example the way the revolution appears in teen and celebrity magazines, advertisements, sports papers, occult and conspiratorial pamphlets, romance novels, comic books, children’s books, auto decals and stickers, trade journals, pop-political analysis, hastily produced biographies of presidential hopefuls, yellow pages, real estate and travel guides, and so on.
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The Bidoun Library is a peripatetic collection of printed materials from and about the ‘Middle East,’ as a product and producer of printed materials. It has traveled extensively throughout the region, from Abu Dhabi to Beirut to Cairo. This summer the Library will spend several months at the Serpentine Gallery in London. All materials donated to the library will be credited and all purchases on its behalf compensated, by arrangement with its librarians. Upon request, Bidoun will return materials after documentation.
Email info@bidoun.org with queries. Though this is an ongoing project, any materials sent to us by the first week of May would be helpful as potential inclusions in the summer issue of Bidoun. Materials could be dropped off at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, 1st floor.
April 26, 2011
Nazlee Radboy’s contribution to Bidoun 16: KIDS is the “Best American Letter to the Editor,” according to the 2010 edition of the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, edited by Dave Eggers. Click here to read Nazlee’s letter.
January 20, 2011
Thursday January 13, 2011 at 6:00 pm
Cezayir 2. Toplantı Salonu, Hayriye caddesi No:12, Galatasaray Beyoğlu
(Talk will be in English)
From 1969 through 1994 AA Bronson lived and worked as one of three artists who together formed the group General Idea, dividing his time between Toronto and New York. For 25 years they published a continuous stream of more than 300 low-cost multiples and publications. From 1972 through 1989 they published the artists’ magazine FILE, and in 1974 they founded Art Metropole, a distribution center and archive for artists’ books.
Since his partner’s deaths in 1994, AA Bronson has worked under his own name, focusing on themes of death, healing, transformation, and social justice. His solo exhibitions have included the Vienna Secession, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Power Plant, Toronto.
As the director of Printed Matter from 2004 to 2010, AA Bronson greatly expanded the activities of this centre for artists’ books in New York. He founded the NY Art Book Fair in 2006. He has also curated many exhibitions, especially of artists’ books and other democratic editions. His exhibition “Queer Zines” was presented at the 2008 NY Art Book Fair and traveled from there to OCA in Oslo.
At My Life in Books, AA will talk about the publications by General Idea, FILE magazine, Art Metropole and his recent experiences at Printed Matter, inc.
Read interview with BAS’s Banu Cennetoglu from Bidoun #18 Interviews.
January 9, 2011
Saturday November 6, 2010
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave
Long Island City, NY
Babak Radboy and Tiffany Malakooti will be representing the Bidoun Library this Saturday morning at a panel discussion on the theme of ‘Experimental Libraries and Reading Rooms’ as part of The Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference at the NY Art Book Fair. Participants include:
Wendy Yao, Ooga Booga;
Andrew Beccone, the Reanimation Library;
Robin Cameron and Jason Polan, the Assembled Picture Library;
Tiffany Malakooti and Babok Radboy, Bidoun Library.
Moderated by Renaud Proch, Independent Curators International (ICI).
Visit the the NY Art Book Fair website for more information or purchase tickets here
November 4, 2010
Thursday November 4, 9-12 Midnight
The Jane Hotel
113 Jane Street
New York
RSVP REQUIRED rsvp@bidoun.org
November 2, 2010
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