Articles

Ghariba

Love and romance, dating and friendship, loneliness and community, all set against the terror of aging.

Meriem Bennani

William Wells

Down at the end of Nabrawy and Hussein El Me’mar Pasha streets, just minutes from Tahrir Square, lies one of those improbable Cairo junctions that seem to suggest an entire world.

Yasmine El Rashidi

Laila Soueif

For decades, Laila Soueif has been a familiar sight at protests across Cairo.

Lina Attalah

Youssef Rakha

The writer Youssef Rakha is the only child of a former Marxist lawyer and a translator.

May al-Ibrashy

The Pasha Resurrects: What ‘Isa Ibn Hisham Told Us

Sometime in the late 1890s, a struggling writer named ‘Isa took a walk in the City of the Dead.

Muhammad al-Muwaylihi

In all cases, it was a beautiful film to make

Amr Ezzat has always had vivid dreams.

Amr Ezzat

Salima Ikram

I mean, if all else fails, I’ll always have butchery. Or I guess I could work in a funeral home.

Negar Azimi

The Delicacy of Radicalism

Squander.

Haytham El-Wardany

Letter from the Creative Director

The issue of Bidoun you hold in your hands has a photograph affixed to its cover.

Babak Radboy

It Was a Publisher’s Idea

On the Bidoun Library.

Bidoun

Michael Stevenson: The deck is always stacked

It is a rare Marxist who does not believe in God but swears that the existence of the devil can be proven by the swing of a door.

Kate Sutton

Michelle Kuo

“If I can read a description of a work and that’s all that you need to know about the work, it’s probably not a very interesting work.”

Negar Azimi, Michael C. Vazquez

Yasmine Hamdan

It’s very weird, because you can change the meaning just by taking a bath beforehand, or having a fight with your mother. I’m a moody singer.

Sophia Al-Maria

Navid Negahban

“I have friends in high school who went to the front line, they come back to school… or they don’t come back, and there’s a red tulip sitting in the chair next to you, and you know that the person is not coming back.”

Lisa Farjam

Conner Habib

“We pretend that sex is some sort of unified animal instinct and that everyone shares it. That’s true at some level, obviously, but our desires are our own. And they are little pathways into our consciousness.”

Anna Della Subin

Marina Warner

“My favorite present to give people used to be a seahorse. They cost twenty pence or something — in those days it was probably a florin — in a little shop that sold straw and raffia and natural products of that kind. For a long time I wanted to write about seahorses, because the male carries the baby.”

Omar Berrada

Documenta 13

One could argue that the thirteenth edition of Documenta, the Kassel quinquennial that ran for one hundred days last summer, was the most Bidoun ever.

Sohrab Mohebbi, Tom Francis, Clare Davies

Vishal Jugdeo’s Goods Carrier

Jugdeo’s video employs minimal means to inhabit his own outsiderness.

Aram Moshayedi

Zahi Hawass

“Revolution happened. The poor became rich, the rich became poor. The lady that used to have to look in the water to see her face, now she has a mirror. They raped the pyramids. The farmer who used to go to the field with an axe, now he goes with a gun. Three people leave their homes in the morning, two come back in the evening.”

Ursula Lindsey

Larry Gagosian

“I started selling posters because I thought I could make more money that way than parking cars. Simple as that. I saw somebody else selling posters and I basically just copied their business. It was a total lack of imagination.”

Negar Azimi