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.
July 27, 2010
Bidoun Magazine and The Delfina Foundation, with the support of the British Council, are pleased to announce the launch of a unique residency opportunity in London to support new writing from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and the Palestinian Territories.
Click here for more information
June 28, 2010
Noa Lidor’s ‘This dark ceiling without a star’ opens at Green Cardamom, London, marked by various site specific installations, including ‘Field (Perseus),’ flutes embedded in concrete in the shape of the Perseus constellation.
Green Cardamom; This dark ceiling without a star’; Noa Lidor; 23 April — 11 June, 2010; http://www.greencardamom.net
May 10, 2010
April 3, 2006
38 Curzon St London W1J 7TY
A film night curated by Bidoun member Tirdad Zolghadr, featuring works by Hito Steyerl (November), Dirk Herzog (Pelmeni/Blini), Fikret Atay (Lalo’s Story) and Giovanni Carmine and Christoph Buchel (PSYOP).
With thanks to Artschool Palestine
April 3, 2006
March 29-April 15, 2006
Counter Gallery, London, and touring to The Galleries Show, Extracity, Antwerp, April 20-25, 2006
A series of week-long exhibitions curated by Bidoun in which artists were given carte blanche not only in terms of content, but are also free to behave as artists or curators in absentia.
Week 1: Shirin Aliabadi & Farhad Moshiri: OPERATION SUPERMARKET
A series of posters alongside a small number of supermarket commodities, mixing, in the words of the artists, “poetry with detergent”. The emphasis here is on the commodification of mainstream media traits of the Middle East, but also on a wry parody of the mythical hopes that are still pinned on the commodity itself as a capitalist agent for change.
Week 2: Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige: THE LOST FILM
An absorbing travel narrative recounting the search for a lost film document, alongside an extract from a video by filmmaker and researcher Akram Zaatari, This Day, which peruses persistent Orientalist patterns through the history of desert photography.
Week 3: Faouzi Rouissi
A writer born in Algiers and barely known in the West, Rouissi is appreciated in local circles for his outspoken style and undaunted prose. Living in exile in Paris since 1994, Rouissi travels widely, publishing a wide array of publications ranging from travel guidebooks to critical anthologies of land art, all in his native Kabyli. Here, Rouissi proposes a selection of paintings and drawings focusing on what he terms “the contagious poetics of envy”. His selection includes a work by the SHAHRZAD collective, from the series I Love You But I Don’t Trust You Anymore (2004), plus painter Rachid Izdaman’s Victimes d’extrêmes remords (2005), and photographic works by Solmaz Shahbazi.
With thanks to Carl Freedman and Jo Stella-Sawicka from Counter Gallery.
March 23, 2006
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