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March 12, 2011
Bidoun Projects at Art Dubai, March 16-19, 2011
January 19, 2011
Bidoun at Art Dubai 2011
Art Dubai
March 16-19, 2011
One again Bidoun Projects has been invited to partner with Art Dubai in bringing you a series of non-profit artist projects, screenings, and miscellaneous more with the theme of “SPORTS” — also the theme of our spring issue, to be launched at the fair.
2011 Bidoun Projects include the Art Park, an underground project space for film, video and talks, that features retrospectives of the work of two pivotal Egyptian artists, Sherif El Azma and Wael Shawky, curated by Bidoun’s Kaelen Wilson-Goldie and Sarah Rifky of the Townhouse Gallery, respectively, as well as a sports-themed video programme featuring a variety of artists including Ziad Antar, Mahmoud Hojeij, Van Leo, and Marwa and Mirene Arsenios.
Limited edition Bidoun trading cards will be distributed, too, and autograph sessions will be held throughout the fair featuring leading lights of the contemporary art world. Bidoun also presents a “live mural” painted and repainted each day throughout the fair by a group of distinguished artists — Dubai-based artist Rokni Haerizadeh and Tehran-based Ali Chitsaz among them — tasked with depicting the theme of “labor.”
The peripatetic Bidoun Library is back, too, featuring “The Natural Order,” a new section specially curated for the fair that focuses on printed material on the Gulf from the past five decades.
Also look out for a special appearance by the collective Slavs and Tatars in the Bidoun Library.
Finally, Bidoun Projects will present a special “Show & Tell” evening dedicated to highlighting Bidoun’s diverse activities past and present.
November 15, 2010
The Winter School Middle East Announced
The Winter School Middle East (WSME) has announced it is to take place in Kuwait in 2011 and for the next three years. The program was previously hosted in Dubai where numerous Bidoun contributors (Antonia Carver, Sunny Rabhar, November Paynter, George Katodrytis) acted as faculty. For more information visit http://www.winterschoolmiddleeast.org. Application Deadline is January 5, 2011.
July 29, 2010
Bidoun Library at the New Museum
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.
July 27, 2010
Bidoun Library at the New Museum, New York
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.