Twitter
Facebook
Category Posts
Issue Launch, Library Closing, Ice cream, and You!
Opening Event, Book Fair and Party: Bidoun Library at the New Museum
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)
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.
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.
Bidoun Storefront Now Open for Business
Our Chinatown storefront is now open to the public! Stop by to purchase new issues (we get them first), back issues, books, totes, t-shirts, posters, pencils, lenticular buttons, holographic stickers or just browse our rotating window library!
47 Orchard Street (between Hester and Grand)
New York, NY, 10002
Hours: Weekdays 10 – 4 (with exceptions 
)
to Grand St
to East Broadway
to Delancey/Essex
Amir Zaki at Perry Rubenstein, New York
LA-based Amir Zaki’s first solo show since 2007, ‘Relics,’ opens at Perry Rubenstein.
Perry Rubenstein gallery; Relics; Amir Zaki; 6 May — 25 June, 2010; http://www.perryrubenstein.com
Fortune-teller: Reflections on the Future of Arts, Education and Economy in the Middle East at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute
April 7, 2010, 6:30 PM
NYU Abu Dhabi Institute: 19 Washington Square North, New York
What does the future hold? Speculations on the political, economic and social future of the Middle East are common in many spheres. Political economists Kiren Aziz Chaudhry and Saskia Sassen join Mishaal Al Gergawi, curator and critic, for an informed discussion, building on each other’s perspectives to propose potential directions for regional developments with implications for arts and education internationally.
This event is part of Romanticide: Love, Loss and Co-dependency in Art and Cultural Politics, a NYU Abu Dhabi Lecture Series in New York City co-sponsored by Bidoun.
The Shape of the Argument: A Talk By Hassan Khan
March 10, 2010 at 6:30 PM
NYU Abu Dhabi Institute: 19 Washington Square North, New York
After insistent vague realizations (signs of consciousness or merely the platitude of self-serving delusion?) the artist investigates: the normalizing institution and its stifling horizons; the relationship between value and aesthetics; willful misreadings by 101 critics; the charged moments of transactions and loss; and last but not least the artist’s secret anger–the drama and its pleasure.
This event is part of Romanticide: Love, Loss and Co-dependency in Art and Cultural Politics, a NYU Abu Dhabi Lecture Series in New York City co-sponsored by Bidoun.
Shahr-e Gheseh Screening at Cabinet Space
Cabinet Space
February 26, 2010, 7pm
300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn
FREE; no RSVP necessary
Bidoun and Cabinet co-present a screening of the film version of Bijan Mofid’s lauded 1967 avant-garde play Shahr-e Gheseh (City of Tales). Set in a mythical city populated by various animals, Shahr-e Gheseh is an allegorical fable in which the fate of a visiting elephant strangely echoes the fate of Iran under the modernity espoused by its rulers in the twentieth century.
Program in Farsi (film has NO SUBTITLES; discussion following also in Farsi)
Ab-Dough-Khiar and other refreshments will be provided.
Dense Objects and Sentient Viewings: Contemporary Artistic Production and the Middle East at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute
February 10, 2010 at 6:30 PM
NYU Abu Dhabi Institute: 19 Washington Square North, New York
Historian Omnia El Shakry outlines recent trends in contemporary artistic production in and about the Middle East, while critically exploring the prevalence of binary understandings of the region as trapped between local ethno-nationalisms and global neo-liberalisms, or between politics and aesthetics.
Omnia El Shakry Associate Professor of History, University of California Davis
This event is part of Romanticide: Love, Loss and Co-dependency in Art and Cultural Politics, a NYU Abu Dhabi Lecture Series in New York City co-sponsored by Bidoun.