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….

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.

In November 2009 Bidoun launched a new, monthly exhibition project aimed at highlighting the work of art photographers based in the UAE.

The Portfolio Project this month will be featuring two former students of the American University of Sharjah, Aisha Miyuki Ansari and Zeinab Hajian, both of whom were taught by AUS professor and artist Tarek Al Ghoussein. The novelty of compositional experimentation and thematic exploration that marks academic work in art photography distinguishes the January series from previous month’s artists Hind Mezaina and Mohamed Somji.

More information on the artists on the Portfolio Project’s page