July 12 – September 17, 2011
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.
Wednesday June 8, 2011
7-9pm
Free!
Centre for Possible Studies
64 Seymour Street
London W1H 5BW
In conjunction with our residency at the Centre for
Possible Studies, the Bidoun Library will present a
program of two films drawn from our collaboration with the
online archive UbuWeb.
The program will be introduced by Masoud Golsorkhi, editor
of
Tank
magazine.
Bahman Maghsoudlou
Ardeshir Mohasses & His Caricatures
1972
20 min
A short documentary about Ardeshir Mohasses (1938-2008)
featuring rare footage of the Iranian artist in his studio
in Iran before his self-exile in New York which was to
last over thirty years. Mohasses’ anti-shah and
anti-Islamic Republic cartoons used settings and costumes
of the Qajar dynasty of 1794 to 1925 — a misdirection that
fooled nobody. The film features commentary from Iranian
intellectuals of the time including Houshang Taheri, Javad
Mojabi, and Fereidoun Gilani whereas Mohasses, a man of
few words, is noticeably mute throughout.
Kamran Shirdel
The Night It Rained
1967
35min
In northern Iran, a schoolboy from a village near Gorgan
is said to have discovered that the railway had been
undermined and washed away by a flood. As the story goes,
when he saw the approaching train, he set fire to his
jacket, ran towards the train and averted a serious and
fatal accident. Kamran Shirdel’s film The Night it Rained
does not concentrate on the heroic deed promulgated in the
newspapers, but on a caricature of social and subtle
political behavior — the way in which witnesses and
officials manage to insert themselves into the research
into this event. Shirdel uses newspaper articles and
interviews with railway employees, the governor, the chief
of police, the village teacher and pupils — each of whom
tell a different version of the event. In the end, they
all contradict each other, while the group of possible or
self-appointed heroes constantly grows. With his cinematic
sleights of hand, Shirdel paints a bittersweet picture of
Iranian Society in which truth, rumor, and lie can no
longer be distinguished.
Upon completion the film was banned and confiscated, and
Shirdel was finally expelled from the Ministry. It was
released seven years later in 1974 to participate in the
Third Tehran International Film Festival, where it won the
GRAND PRIX by a unanimous vote, only to be banned again
until after the revolution.
June 3, 2011
Art Dubai
March 16-19, 2011
One again Bidoun Projects has been invited to partner
with Art Dubai in bringing you a series of non-profit
artist projects, screenings, and miscellaneous more with
the theme of “SPORTS” — also the theme of our spring
issue, to be launched at the fair.
2011 Bidoun Projects include the Art Park, an
underground project space for film, video and talks,
that features retrospectives of the work of two pivotal
Egyptian artists, Sherif El Azma and Wael Shawky,
curated by Bidoun’s Kaelen Wilson-Goldie and Sarah Rifky
of the Townhouse Gallery, respectively, as well as a
sports-themed video programme featuring a variety of
artists including Ziad Antar, Mahmoud Hojeij, Van Leo,
and Marwa and Mirene Arsenios.
Limited edition Bidoun trading cards will be
distributed, too, and autograph sessions will be held
throughout the fair featuring leading lights of the
contemporary art world. Bidoun also presents a “live
mural” painted and repainted each day throughout the
fair by a group of distinguished artists — Dubai-based
artist Rokni Haerizadeh and Tehran-based Ali Chitsaz
among them — tasked with depicting the theme of “labor.”
The peripatetic Bidoun Library is back, too, featuring
“The Natural Order,” a new section specially curated for
the fair that focuses on printed material on the Gulf
from the past five decades.
Also look out for a special appearance by the collective
Slavs and Tatars in the Bidoun Library.
Finally, Bidoun Projects will present a special “Show
& Tell” evening dedicated to highlighting Bidoun’s
diverse activities past and present.
January 19, 2011
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
January 10, 2011
The
Bidoun Video Project 2010
landed in Thessaloniki, Greece on September 11
through October 12, 2010. The programs were curated
by Bidoun and guest curators Masoud Amralla Al Ali,
Aram Moshayedi, and the duo of Özge Ersoy and Sohrab
Mohebbi.
Visit ArtBOX for
more information
September 13, 2010
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.
July 29, 2010
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.
July 27, 2010
From October 2009 through January 2010, four
documentary photographers—Farhad Parsa, Arash
Saedinia, Parisa Taghizadeh, and Ramin
Talaie—focused their lenses on
second-generation Iranian-Americans of Los
Angeles, the world’s largest population of
expatriate Iranians.
Fowler Museum at UCLA; Document:
Iranian-Americans in Los Angeles; 6 June — 22
August, 2010; Farhad Parsa, Arash Saedinia,
Parisa Taghizadeh, Ramin Talaie;
http://www.fowler.ucla.edu
June 14, 2010
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