For the inaugural Bidoun Library Saturday Seminar author Hisham Matar will be reading from his second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance. This will be followed by an in-conversation with cultural journalist and critic Maya Jaggi. The event will be introduced by writer, editor and curator Shumon Basar

Hisham Matar (born 1970) is a Libyan author. Born in New York City in 1970 to Libyan parents, Matar spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. He has lived in the UK since 1986. His debut novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and won the 2007 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. Matar’s essays have appeared in Asharq Alawsat, The Independent, The Guardian, The Times and The New York Times.

The Bidoun Library Project is up at the Serpentine from 12 July – 17 September. Click here for more information on Saturday Seminars.

Literacy expert, Dr. Frank Laubach, works late into the night on Afghan reading primers (March 1951). Here, he sits on a table to make the most of the lone lightbulb in his dim hotel room.

This summer, the Bidoun Library will be in residence at the Serpentine Gallery with a program of exhibitions, talks, screenings and an Egyptian shaabi wedding/dance party. Founded in 2009, the Bidoun Library is a peripatetic resource of books, periodicals and ephemera developed by Bidoun Projects, a not-for-profit publishing, curatorial and educational initiative dedicated to supporting contemporary culture from the Middle East.

In London, amid library closings and deaccessionings that have let thousands of publications loose upon the market, the Bidoun Library will address that crisis, as well as the printed aftermatter of the Egyptian revolution that began in earnest on January 25, 2011.

Months of research, purchasing and hoarding have amassed a collection of (nearly) every book printed and every newspaper and periodical founded since the revolution began — from soap-operatic novellas about Hosni Mubarak’s last days in power, to special revolution issues of teen, fitness, and in-flight magazines, as well as previously-banned political treatises. This material, along with publications obtained in London during Bidoun’s residency at the Centre for Possible Studies on Edgware Road, will be placed amongst the Library’s eclectic catalogue of guidebooks, political treatises, romance novels, comic books, travelogues, and oil company publications — a veritable cornucopia of representation.

Bidoun 25 — the issue that will launch at the Serpentine this summer — also considers the revolution in Egypt (and the volume of words it occasioned, in print and online), in what may well be the most information-dense Bidoun ever in history.

During July and August, Bidoun will host a series of events bringing together leading writers and artists:




Saturday, July 16
Hisham Matar
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm

Author of In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance, Hisham Matar was born in New York City in 1970 to Libyan parents, Matar spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. He has lived in the UK since 1986.

Monday, July 18
Rania Stephan: The Three Disappearances of Suad Hosni

The Gate Cinema, Notting Hill, 7pm

Former Edgware Road Project artist-in-residence Rania Stephan returns to present the UK premiere of her film The Three Disappearances of Suad Hosni (2011), which recently won the Sharjah Biennial Prize. The film’s non-fiction narrative reflects on the life and death of Egyptian actress Suad Hosni, who committed suicide while living on Edgware Road in 2001.

Friday, July 22
Shaabi-Music-Wedding-Dance-Party


Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 8pm

Bidoun Projects present an evening of loud Egyptian Shaabi music, dancing, readings, and an actual wedding, all at the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011. This event is commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery as part of the Edgware Road Project.

Saturday, July 23
Nawal Al Saadawi


Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm

Author of over forty-seven books, Nawal Al Saadawi is a pioneering Egyptian activist, psychiatrist, feminist, and political activist. Her books include Women and Sex, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, and God Dies by the Nile. Saadawi’s life in struggle has seen her incarcerated in the 1970s for speaking out against the corruption of the Sadat regime, forced by Islamists to flee Egypt for eight years in the 1990s. She was among the protesters in Tahrir Square in 2011.

Saturday, July 30

Samandal: Picture Stories From Here and There
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm

Samandal is a Beirut-based trilingual magazine dedicated to comics, cartoons, and other picture stories. The goal of Samandal is to provide a platform on which graphic artists from Lebanon, the Middle East, and the world may experiment with various combinations of word and image for the benefit of a polyglot international audience… that loves comics.

Saturday, August
 6
Slavs and Tatars: Molla Nasreddin, The Magazine That Woud’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm

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.

Saturday, August 13
Michael C. Vazquez

: The Periodical Cold War: Tales from the Bidoun Library
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm

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. Bidoun Senior Editor and librarian Michael C. Vazquez presents an illustrated lecture on pivotal moments in periodical diplomacy, with especial focus on Transition (Kampala, Uganda), Tricontinental (Havana, Cuba), and Lotus: Afro-Asian Writing (Cairo / Beirut / Tunis).

Saturday, August 20
Ahdaf Soueif
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm

Based in London and Cairo, Ahdaf Soueif is a critic, activist, translator, and novelist whose works include In the Eye of the Sun, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground and The Map of Love. Winner of the 2010 Mahmoud Darwish Award for her work on Palestine, Soueif comes from a family of activists and writers who have been some of the key protagonists of the Egyptian revolution. In this seminar on writing and the revolution, Soueif will be discussing her work and sharing her experiences of activism and authorship over the past two decades.

Saturday, August 27
UK Libraries: Struggles for the Knowledge Commons


Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm

A panel of leading activists reflect on the current struggles around the closing of public libraries in the UK.

Saturday, September 3
Sonallah Ibrahim


Sackler Centre of Arts Education, 3pm

In 2003, Sonallah Ibrahim — the author of Zaat, Stealth, The Smell of It, and The Committee, among other books — publicly refused a prestigious literary award given to him by the Egyptian ministry of culture. It was only the latest inspiring outrage from this novelist and writer, who’d been imprisoned for five years under the Nasser regime for his leftist politics. Ibrahim remains an outspoken critic and force of legend in Egypt.

]]> http://www.bidoun.org/egypt/the-bidoun-library-at-the-serpentine-gallery-london/feed/ 0 http://www.bidoun.org/bidoun/bidoun-in-the-best-american-nonrequired-reading/ http://www.bidoun.org/bidoun/bidoun-in-the-best-american-nonrequired-reading/#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:54:54 +0000 admin http://www.bidoun.org/?p=3090

Nazlee Radboy’s contribution to Bidoun 16: KIDS is the “Best American Letter to the Editor,” according to the 2010 edition of the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, edited by Dave Eggers. Click here to read Nazlee’s letter.

]]> http://www.bidoun.org/bidoun/bidoun-in-the-best-american-nonrequired-reading/feed/ 0 http://www.bidoun.org/film/the-delfina-foundation-presents-the-best-of-sammy-clark-sonic-grounds/ http://www.bidoun.org/film/the-delfina-foundation-presents-the-best-of-sammy-clark-sonic-grounds/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:25:16 +0000 admin http://www.bidoun.org/?p=2946 Exhibition: January 11 to February 18, 2011
Video Screeening and Talk: Wednesday January 12 at 6:00pm
The Delfina Foundation
29 Catherine Place, Victoria, London



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

]]> http://www.bidoun.org/film/the-delfina-foundation-presents-the-best-of-sammy-clark-sonic-grounds/feed/ 0 http://www.bidoun.org/beirut/rayya-badran-selected-for-bidoundelfina-new-writing-residency/ http://www.bidoun.org/beirut/rayya-badran-selected-for-bidoundelfina-new-writing-residency/#comments Tue, 14 Sep 2010 22:59:06 +0000 admin http://www.bidoun.org/?p=2466

Delfina Foundation and Bidoun are pleased to announce that Rayya Badran has been selected for the Bidoun/Delfina New Writing Residency, supported by the British Council.

Rayya Badran (b. 1984) is a writer based in Beirut who focuses on the performative nature of the voice as well as on characteristics of aurality and music in film and video. In recent years, her research has explored melancholy in music. Her first publication entitled Radiophonic Voice(s) was produced in the framework of Ashkal Alwan’s Homeworks 5: A forum on cultural practices in April-May 2010, Beirut. The publication engaged two radiophonic events recorded and filmed in 2006 during the Israeli war on Lebanon. Rayya will be in residence in Winter of 2011 during which time she will research how popular culture, specifically Western music, is received, lived and later theorized among different generations in the context of Beirut.

]]> http://www.bidoun.org/beirut/rayya-badran-selected-for-bidoundelfina-new-writing-residency/feed/ 0 http://www.bidoun.org/parties/bidoun-library-at-the-new-museum-2/ http://www.bidoun.org/parties/bidoun-library-at-the-new-museum-2/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:02:23 +0000 admin http://bidoun.com/bdn/?p=2312

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.

]]> http://www.bidoun.org/parties/bidoun-library-at-the-new-museum-2/feed/ 0 http://www.bidoun.org/events/bidoun-library-at-the-new-museum/ http://www.bidoun.org/events/bidoun-library-at-the-new-museum/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 01:18:48 +0000 admin http://bidoun.com/bdn/?p=2306

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.

]]> http://www.bidoun.org/events/bidoun-library-at-the-new-museum/feed/ 0 http://www.bidoun.org/london/bidoun-delfina-writing-residency/ http://www.bidoun.org/london/bidoun-delfina-writing-residency/#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:21:19 +0000 admin http://bidoun.com/bdn/?p=2094

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

]]> http://www.bidoun.org/london/bidoun-delfina-writing-residency/feed/ 0 http://www.bidoun.org/events/announcing-bidoun-workshops-2010/ http://www.bidoun.org/events/announcing-bidoun-workshops-2010/#comments Sat, 26 Dec 2009 16:02:25 +0000 admin http://bidoun.com/bdn/?p=1300

In January 2010, Bidoun Projects, in partnership with the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) launches a course of workshops that focus on writing about art and offer the opportunity for critical debate.

For more information, check the Workshops project page.

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