Thursday August 5, 2010 at 7 PM
235 Bowery
New York, NY

To mark the opening of “Museum as Hub: Bidoun Library Project,” Bidoun will present selected readings and video clips from the Bidoun Library collection. In addition, for the opening day of the project, Bidoun has invited booksellers usually found outside the New York University library to set up shop outside the New Museum.

Join us afterward for dancing and drinks at:

Sweet and Vicious
5 Spring Street
9pm
Music by Tim DeWitt (Gang Gang Dance)

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.

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.

Provisions II is the second volume of the catalog for Sharjah Biennial 9 co-published by Sharjah Art Foundation and Bidoun. The book features contributions in the form of artist’s projects and diaries from Yazan Khalili, Doug Henders, Lawrence Weiner, Ana Vidigal, Sophia Al-Maria, Ziad Antar, Nika Oblak & Primoz Novak, Sherene Seikaly, Sophie Ernst, Shumon Basar, Fernando Jose Pereira, Kaelin Wilson-Goldie, Liliana Porter, Nida Sinnokrot, Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, Basma Al Sharif, Mona El-Mousfy, Clare Davies, Ayşe Erkmen and Isabel Carlos.

Buy now for $40 or as a set with Provisions I for $60.

To show our appreciation, 5 lucky responders will win a 1-year subscription to Bidoun.

We can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

— Team Bidoun

Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Robert Adanto; Pearls on the Ocean Floor; Free; http://www.lacma.org

Djibril Diop Mambéty
Contras City
1968, 21 min

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s earliest film, a short entitled Contras City (1968), highlights the contrasts of cosmopolitanism and unrestrained ostentation in Dakar’s baroque architecture against the modest, everyday lives of the Senegalese. Mambéty’s recurrent theme of hybridity—the blending of elements from precolonial Africa and the colonial West in a neocolonial African context—is already evident in Contras City, which is often considered Africa’s first comedy film.

Watch Contras City on UbuWeb

The exhibition includes work by Paul Lowe, Phil Collins, Gilles Peress, Gilles Saussier, Paul Fusco, Laura Kurgan, Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg, Clemente Bernad, Allan Sekula, Hito Steyerl, Kadir van Lohuizen, Goran Galic and Gian-Reto Gredig, Renzo Martens, Peter Piller, Walid Raad, and Harun Farocki; archives collected by Mauro Andrizzi, Ministry of Public Works and Housing (Gaza Strip), Ariella Azoulay, Susan Meiselas, and Sohrab Mohebbi; music videos edited by Jonathan Cavender, Robbie Wright, and Shane McDonald.

La Virreina Centre de l’Image; Antiphotojournalism; Various; 5 July — 10 October 2010; http://antiphotojournalism.blogspot.com