Image courtesy Sarah Carr

Featuring music by Sadat, Figo, and Amr 7a7a

Tickets £5/£4

Available from the Gallery Lobby Desk or Ticketweb.

The Shaabi-Music-Wedding-Dance-Party is part of the Bidoun Library Project, up at the Serpentine Gallery until September 17th.

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.

The Best of Sammy Clark by Raed Yassin
The Best of Sammy Clark (2008) is a tribute to Sammy Clark, a 1980s Lebanese pop music icon and Raed Yassin’s fictive mentor. The installation suggests a contrived genealogy, which links Yassin to Clark, and explores the artist’s personal narrative, as well as the recent history of Lebanon, through the lens of consumer culture and mass production.

Sonic Grounds curated by Rayya Badran
A series of talks and performances throughout January and February 2011. Contributors include Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mark Fisher, Raed Yassin, and Rayya Badran, the recipient of this year’s Bidoun/ Delfina New Writing Residency.

Sonic Grounds explores the intersection between popular music, radio and writing. The series of events unpacks some of the thoughts that emanate from The Best of Sammy Clark, by expanding the discussion to topics of popular culture, sampling and the politics of aurality in London and Beirut.

Video Screeening: Featuring Mahmoud Yassin
Wednesday 12 January 2011,
 18:00 – 20:00, at The Delfina Foundation.
Four video works by Raed Yassin followed by a conversation between the artist and Rayya Badran. Free event. Rsvp required at rspv@delfinafoundation.com

Visit the Delfina website for more information

Tuesday November 30, 6:30pm
20 Cooper Square
New York
Directed by Omar Majeed
2009, 80 minutes
Presented by Michael C. Vazquez

NYU’s Program for Asian/Pacific/American Studies presents a screening of Taqwacore as part of its program ‘WRONG MUSLIM: a series on infidels.’ Taqwacore is a roaring, rollicking portrait of Muhammad Knight, The Kominas, and a brown wave of riot grrl, metal, anarcho-punk and shouty-shout bands — among them Vote Hezbollah and Secret Trial Five, the latter fronted by a Pakistani lesbian from Vancouver and best known for their song ‘Middle Eastern Zombies’ — as they travel from suburban basements to Lahore. There the drugs are great, the response from locals slightly less so….

RSVP REQUIRED rsvp@bidoun.org

A full-length documentary and interdisciplinary book will subsequently support the AnaPop event featuring 4 days of concerts, performances, workshops and a range of exhibitions (including photographs, LP artworks and posters).
AnaPop provides a unique opportunity to see some of the most acclaimed performers of the period playing live whilst at the same time creating the right milieu to foster new music.

September 15th -16th -17th 2010: Workshops, Seminars, Documentary Screenings
Saturday September 18th, 2010: Concerts at İ.M.Ç 6. Blok Unkapanı, Istanbul
Concert day doors open: 16:00, until 00:00
Visit www.anapop.org for detailed information
Online ticket sales at www.biletix.com.

Thursday August 5, 2010 at 7 PM
235 Bowery
New York, NY

To mark the opening of “Museum as Hub: Bidoun Library Project,” Bidoun will present selected readings and video clips from the Bidoun Library collection. In addition, for the opening day of the project, Bidoun has invited booksellers usually found outside the New York University library to set up shop outside the New Museum.

Join us afterward for dancing and drinks at:

Sweet and Vicious
5 Spring Street
9pm
Music by Tim DeWitt (Gang Gang Dance)

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.