In 1974, the children’s publishing house Dar El Fata El Arabi was launched in Beirut. Over the next decade, Dar El Fata—staffed by artists, designers, and writers devoted to bringing attention to the Palestinian cause—produced some of the most visually striking and progressive children’s books in the region. Bidoun sat down with Mohieddin Ellabbad, one of the co-founders of the publishing house and its first and most influential art director, as well as Nawal Traboulsi, a leading expert on children’s literature and reading habits, who got her start as an amateur illustrator hand-picked by Ellabbad to work with him making books.

On September 4, 1972, the novelist and futurist Fereidoun M. Esfandiary published an editorial on the op-ed page of The New York Times concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict. Titled “A Plague on Both Your Tribes,” it announced that the situation had become a “monumental bore”: that the leadership had failed, and the antagonists, “acting like adolescents, refuse to resolve their wasteful 25-year-old brawl,” even as other nations of the world were “rapidly patching up their differences.” Esfandiary decried the violent stalemate over territory, especially since the world was, in any case, “irreversibly evolving beyond the concept of national homeland.” Citing a recent United Nations study on global youth, he extolled a “new kind of population, more resilient and adaptable than their elders,” with a “feeling of world solidarity and a sense of common responsibility to achieve peace.” In a future that was just around the corner, today’s youth would take care of the Arab-Israeli problem—in part by realizing that it was already obsolete. He concluded the piece with an exasperated injunction: “Let us get on with it.

In the Tehran of my childhood, John Wayne was a household name. His swagger was adopted by tough guys in the street, his gun-slinging mimicked up and down the schoolyard. When we played Cowboy Bazi, which was all the time, Wayne was the original cowboy, the archetypal icon from abroad.
He was hardly the only one, [...]

In December 1971, Iannis Xenakis penned an open letter to Le Monde, defending his participation in the Shiraz Arts Festival earlier that year. The Greek composer had created a massive sound and light show for the festival, part of the Persepolis celebrations, a thirteen-day extravaganza celebrating 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. It was his third time at the Shiraz Festival, but that year’s instantly notorious event provoked a hailstorm of criticism, not least from Iranian exiles in Paris.

In the spring of 1971, Alighiero Boetti arrived in Afghanistan. The Italian artist was seeking a “distant thing,” he said. Certainly he had plenty to get away from. Boetti’s career had begun in the early 60s, in Turin, and his spryly conceptual artworks had been identified with the Arte Povera movement. But he had drifted away from Arte Povera’s “guerilla war,” and was surely dismayed by the onset of the Italian “Years of Lead”—bombings, kidnappings, and shootings, perpetrated by neofascists and leftists alike. Afghanistan was a world away, a pacific, unspoiled place of great natural beauty. “I considered traveling from a purely personal, hedonistic point of view,” Boetti once said. “I was fascinated by the desert… the bareness, the civilization of the desert.”

BIDOUN UPDATES

LETTER

PREVIEWS

INFRASTRUCTURE
REVOLUTION FOR KIDS

TRAVEL
ALIGHIERO & THE ONE HOTEL
Tom Francis

MUSEUM
A Capitalist hallucination
William E. Jones

WORK IN PROGRESS
SERHAT KOKSEL
Alexander Provan

Alessandro Yazbek & Media Farzin
Negar Azimi

COLLECTION

TRANSMISSIONS
Alan Bishop

ARTIST PROJECT
ART WORLD
Danielle Van Ark

NOISE
THE FUTURE TAKES FOREVER
Benjamin Tiven

ARTIST PROJECT
INDIAN WHISTLING ASSOCIATION
Gauri Gill

NOISE EDUCATION
CEDVET EREK
Michael C. Vazquez

HASSAN KAHN
Michael C. Vazquez

ARTIST PROJECT
KUWAITI KAR KRASH

YOUNG SYRIAN PAINTERS
Yto Barrada

NOISE EDUCATION
JACE CLAYTON & KELEFA SANNEH
Michael C. Vazquez

TRUE DUB
ABOU FARMAN

CHARMLESS MAN
Lina Mounzer

Boy Talk
Fatima Al Qadiri

Correspondence:B & X

Destiny For Dinner
Gini Alhadeff

TONE POEM
Sophia Al Maria

Satellite of Hub
Sophia Al Maria

FILM ARCHIVE
The Lovers’ Wind
Lucy Raven & Tiffany Malakooti

MUSIC
DISCOVERY
Gary Dauphin

EXHIBITIONS
Made in Iran
Xerxes Cook

Hito Steyerl
Max Bach

Iran Inside Out
Media Farzin

11th ISTANBUL BIENNIAL
Sarah-Neel Smith

Nasreen Mohamedi
Guy Mannes-Abbott

Rosalind Nashashibi
Ghalya Saadawi

The Pick 4
Clare Davies

Pages
Sarah-Neel Smith

Guy Tillem
Benjamin Tiven

Video Works
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

BOOKS
The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters
Richard Bernstein

Photography & Egypt
Maria Golia

Abnaa Al Gebelawi
Ibrahim Farghali

SHORT TAKES