Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 7pm
New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York
Transition: An International Review is an award-winning journal of Africa and its many diasporas — where a strikingly large number of Bidounis got their start. On December 8th, Bidoun’s Michael Vazquez and an all-star cast mark the 50th anniversary of Transition’s founding with performances, readings, and an editor’s roundtable, hosted by Kelefa Sanneh and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts.
Saturday, August
13
Tales From the Bidoun Library Vol.1 Intercontinentalism: A Partial History of Magazine Diplomacy by Michael C. Vazquez
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm
Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, W2
Introduction and question time with Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
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.
Michael Vazquez presents an illustrated lecture on pivotal moments in periodical diplomacy, with especial focus on Transition (Kampala / Accra), Tricontinental (Havana), and Lotus: Afro-Asian Writing (Cairo / Beirut / Tunis).
Michael C Vazquez is Senior Editor at Bidoun and a member of the Bidoun Library group. He was formerly Executive Editor of the revived Transition (Cambridge, MA). He writes often about music and magazines for Bidoun and other venues.
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is a writer whose work has appeared in Transition, The New York Times, Harper’s, Bidoun, and Essence among others. Her book, Harlem is Nowhere, the first volume of a trilogy on black utopias, is just out in the UK from Granta Books.
Saturday, August
6
Slavs and Tatars: Molla Nasreddin, The Magazine That Woud’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm
Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, W2
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.
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.
From October 12th to November 24th, the Bidoun Library and Project Space will be hosted by the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. Contemporaneous with the library will be a symposium devoted to archival practices, “Speak, Memory,” which brings together photographer Susan Meiselas, members of the collective Pad.ma, Claire Hsu of the Asia Art Archive, Negar Azimi and Yasmine Eid Sabbagh of the Arab Image Foundation, Vasif Kortun of Platform Garanti in Istanbul, and many others. As part of Bidoun’s program, the Bidoun Library will host talks by historian Khaled Fahmy and curator Bassem El-Baroni, co-founder of the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum and co-curator of Manifesta 8. The Bidoun program is curated by Contributing Editor Hassan Khan.
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.
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Bidoun Library & Project Space @ 98 Weeks
On display until May 15, 2010!
98 Weeks Project Space, Ground Floor, Chalhoub Building, Off Nahr Street, Facing Spoiler Center, Before Jisr Hadid, Mar Mikhael
The 98 Weeks Project Space is open daily from 3pm to 7pm, except on Sundays.
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