Yasmeen Al Awadi's Teeyla

Kate Sutton

Letter from the Creative Director

Babak Radboy

It Was a Publisher's Idea

On the Bidoun Library.

Bidoun

Letter from the Editor

Tapping into exciting new markets in the land of overwhelming opportunity.

Lisa Farjam

Recent and Upcoming Bidoun Happenings

Bidoun

Slavs and Tatars

Media Farzin

Memoirs of an Al-Ahram Journalist

On the afternoon of February 11, 2011, I watched a presenter from Egyptian state television extend his microphone carefully through the barbed wire barricade that had been erected around the iconic Radio and TV Building on the banks of the Nile in central Cairo.

Ursula Lindsey

Vishal Jugdeo’s Goods Carrier

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

Aram Moshayedi

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

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

Hossein Amanat

"One gets very impressed by the forms in Iranian architecture. One of the greatest messages is the sequence of volumes: how an outdoor space, say, can give you an impression of enclosure, and then you come to a smaller space, or a lower or higher space, the interrelations of different volumes and proportions — the time it takes to walk through, the amount of light you experience as you pass..."

Benjamin Tiven

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

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

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

Michael Stevenson

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

Letter From Their Editors

Yerevan Magazine

Letter to the Editor

Bidoun

Slavs and Tatars

Media Farzin

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

Jeremy Deller

"Genuine boredom… bloody hell, I remember boredom. It’s amazing! Sunday afternoon, on a wet Sunday afternoon, that’s when you sort of took to your bedroom and got your books out or something."

Sukhdev Sandhu

Hassan Khan

Sarah-Neel Smith

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

Gwangju Biennale 2012

Sohrab Mohebbi

Céline Condorelli's The Egypt Project

What began as a series of installations and performances called There Is Nothing Left had become a large, lingering project that seemed like it would never go away.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

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

Memoirs of an Al-Ahram Journalist

On the afternoon of February 11, 2011, I watched a presenter from Egyptian state television extend his microphone carefully through the barbed wire barricade that had been erected around the iconic Radio and TV Building on the banks of the Nile in central Cairo.

Ursula Lindsey

Michael Stevenson

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

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

Tongues

Amid the rising, falling tide of gobbledygook the preacher would suddenly start to shout in Somali.

Nimco Mahamud-Hassan

RIPs

Bidoun

The Colonel

Christopher de Bellaigue

Aliens

Banners like Non-Alignment and Islam can be taken down and rolled up as circumstances dictate, but people often get left behind.

Darryl Li

The Imaginary Elsewhere

The political import of these works has less to do with representation than with the pleasures and perils of storytelling, the effort to recast the everyday into mythical structures that speak to universal desires.

Media Farzin

Imprisoned Airs

In life, Reza Abdoh inspired all manner of fantastical tales.

Daniel Mufson

Aleph Null

People remember Shridhar with regret because that’s how they remember themselves — their disillusionments and disappointments, their selling out or failing to sell, their settling down and surviving.

Alexander Keefe

Rokni Haerizadeh's The Reign of Winter

When the sheets are all sewn together, the work will represent an unlikely, if not maudlin, take on this exploding piñata of privilege.

Negar Azimi

Mona Eltahawy

"We went on hajj soon after we arrived in Saudi, and I was groped beside the Kaaba, as I was kissing the black stone — the heavenly white stone that was tainted black by the sins of humanity."

Yasmine El Rashidi

Hassan Sharif

Ghalya Saadawi

Gulfiwood

There is a body of cinema about life in the Gulf, that is consumed by the majority of the population of the Gulf, that requires no special pleading or state subsidy to exist — the popular culture of the Arab working class, most of whom happen to be Indian.

Sudarshan Purohit

A Very Still Life

Quite at home in the museum, the severed head of a young woman dangles by her hair a few feet from the reception desk.

Anna Della Subin

The Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival

Ania Szremski

New Museum Triennial

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Model UNESCO: A Roundtable

American participation in the International Cairo Biennale has been wrongheadedly PC, expensive, beautiful, boring, and/or outright controversial.

Bidoun

La Triennale 2012

Sam Thorne

Haj to Utopia

They were drawn from a seemingly incoherent mix of -isms: pan-Islamism, Irish republicanism and Bolshevism.

Hussein Omar

Jumana Manna

Here, the touch of her swim coach’s hand can stand in for all the sexual slippage of a woman coming of age in water.

Kate Sutton

Notes on a Century

Alongside these formidable accomplishments, there is a Bernard Lewis who is reviled by leftish academia and who is surrounded by dubious sycophants.

Issandr El Amrani

Yto Barrada

Martin Herbert

Mumu's Gelateria Café & Barbershop

The secret of my success has always been to rely on myself and not on others. I try not to give anyone the evil eye.

Yasmine Seale

Brute Ornament

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Etel Adnan, Aquawoman

One might naturally fear for a film that can be described as a half-hour-long poetry reading.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Call Me Soft

On a warm August night in Brussels, a curator, Orient, of feminist inclination, dressed up in an Egyptian belly dance costume, swaying her hips and breasts to Umm Kulthum’s epic song of a thousand and one nights.

Sarah Rifky

Pieties

A snowy polar bear skin splayed across a floor of Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali al-Thani’s guest house in Doha diverted a small crowd of visiting artists and art professionals on their way to a sumptuous dinner.

Clare Davies

The Marble Lawn

I was seven when my father left for Saudi Arabia.

Yasmine El Rashidi

In the Presence of Absence

Mahmoud Darwish’s later poetry is a gathering of ghosts.

Robyn Creswell

The 3rd Athens Biennale

Tom Morton

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

In December of 1985, James Vance and Raymond Belknap, age twenty and eighteen, respectively, shot themselves in the face after many hours of beer drinking and dope smoking in a church parking lot in the town of Sparks, Nevada.

Negar Azimi

Franziska Pierwoss

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Monocle #49

Bidoun

The Chibsi Challenge

Sarah Fan, Sophia Al-Maria, Anna Della Subin, Yasmeen Alsudairy, Andy Pressman, Sukhdev Sandhu, E.P. Licursi

The Serendipity of Sand

If my former boss were reduced to a collection of ideal geometric forms, he would be a circle and a line segment. If described by a child, in deepest winter: two-thirds of a snowman on a stick.

Anand Balakrishnan

Occupy Godhead

As the motorcade crept up Broadway, the shower of tickertape and confetti was so thick that one might have failed to notice Emperor Haile Selassie I, serene as a saint, buried in the pomp and protocol of his own welcoming.

Anna Della Subin

Sticky Fingers

Marwa Sharafeldin, Issandr El Amrani, Moukhtar Kocache, Basma El Husseiny, Amr Gharbeia, Angela Harutyunyan, William Wells, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Khaled El Qazzaz, Oussama Rifahi, Hossam El Hamalawy, Sarah Rifky

Fifteen Ways to Leave Badiou

Sarah Rifky

A Rose in the Desert

Bidoun

Hamlet’s Arab Journey

Hussein Omar

Utopia

My first introduction to Egypt’s Beverly Hills came sometime in 2006. Its billboard loomed over a dust-coated building, visible from a crossroads of thoroughfares and the looping tentacles of the mammoth bridge that links downtown to every other part of the city.

Yasmine El Rashidi

The Angry, Angry Arab

Babak Radboy, E.P. Licursi

The Bequest of Quest

Quest was strange, delightful, controversial, and mostly forgotten.

Soft Readers Prefer Hard Covers

Last year, for the first time, e-books outsold hardback editions on Amazon.com. We are past the Rubicon. It’s a new frontier for digitized distribution, a post-publishing paroxysm.

Shumon Basar

Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914

Suzy Hansen

Letter from your Thought Partners

Bidoun

Iran via Video Current

Media Farzin

The 12th Istanbul Biennial

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Iman Issa

A long glass display case holds a meticulous arrangement of an older man’s effects, including cufflinks, a pocket watch, a letter opener, and two albums of black-and-white photographs.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Haris Epaminonda

Gini Alhadeff

Ozymandias Moments

Jarett Kobek

Hello I Am An American Journalist #1

Bidoun

Habitat for Inhumanity

Bidoun

Practical Advice

Bidoun

Red Square

Monologue of a communist in Tahrir Square.

Zahara

Rabih Mroué

Eleanor Nairne

The Colors of Infamy

Albert Cossery

Talk of the Townhouse

Bidoun

The Revolution Will Not Be Fictionalized

Mahmoud Othman

A Few Bad Men

Bidoun

Stay Away From My Afterlife!

Bidoun

Muslim Bro 2.0

Bidoun

The New Gornalism

Bidoun

Sharjah Biennial 10

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Denial TV

Bidoun

Eat More Cheese

Will Raynolds

We the Animal People

Anna Della Subin

Asunción Molinos Gordo

Clare Davies

An Activist Encounters Her File

Yasmine El Rashidi

How To Revolt

Bidoun

Egypt Be Egypt

Bidoun

Death By Obituary

Jenna Krajeski

Molla Nasreddin: The Magazine That Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve

Alexander Provan

This is Not a Program

Alan Gilbert

No More Revolutions

Ayman Ramadan

S, M, L, XS

A conversation with Ahmed, a seller of revolution t-shirts in Tahrir Square.

Bidoun

Hello I Am An American Journalist #2

Bidoun

Letter to the Editors

Bidoun

Sixty-Four Antiquities Stolen from the Egyptian Museum on January 28

Bidoun

Thirty-Three Questions

Doa Aly

Tomorrow Only Started With A Thought

Bidoun

Hassan Sharif

Nida Ghouse

Excavating the Egyptians

On discovering the Egyptian band El Masryeen.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Massive Scar Era Confessional

Interview with members of the hardcore Alexandrian metal band Massive Scar Era.

Bidoun

Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin

Shumon Basar

Enough is Not Enough

Bidoun

Life as Politics

Tom Francis

All Content is Useful

Bidoun

Edge of Arabia

Alia Al-Sabi

"Who Said He Was Not Tortured?"

Bidoun

The Family That Revolts Together

Bidoun

Statues

Bidoun

Video Works 2011

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Anatomy of a Disappearance

Yasmine Seale

Shahryar Nashat

Martin Herbert

Proof That it Happened

Bidoun

The Particular Believer

Bidoun

Claw Your Hands and Say Yeah

Sophia Al-Maria

Ads

Bidoun

Walid Raad

Martin Herbert

Alvaro Perdices

In 2009, Los Angeles-based artist Álvaro Perdices traveled to Oran, Algeria, with a friend working on the restoration and preservation of cultural artifacts at the Musée National Zabana.

Aram Moshayedi

Mathaf

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The Puppet

Book review of Ibrahim al-Koni’s The Puppet

Ursula Lindsey

Global Hotting

The news was delicious, and not just as a pick-me-up for a nation still hungry for global recognition.

Kai Friese

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

It’s hard to know who was the first to say: “Art is anything you can get away with,” but chances are good it was Marshall McLuhan, not Andy Warhol.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Artists’ Magazines

Alexander Provan

Mourina Al Solh / Wael Shawky

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The Work of Sport in the Age of International Acquisition

Hardly anyone took notice when Cherono switched his citizenship and name in exchange for a lifetime monthly salary of $1,000 and the standard complement of elite trainers and cutting-edge facilities.

Alexander Provan

Morning Ashtanga Routine Moments, Not Instructions

Zeina Durra is the ultimate cosmopolitan.

Zeina Durra

The Hashimite Kingdom

In 1984, Madonna Louise Ciccone left a downtown Manhattan club without her leather wristbands.

Dave Tomkins

Beyond the Rally of the Dolls

Drive along the corniche in Doha tonight and you’ll see the laser lights and heart-shaped fireworks of victory.

Sophia Al-Maria

Hello Gorgeous

Omar Sharif represented Egypt in the 1964 Olympics for the game of contract bridge, according to one of the more benign rumors circulating about him on the internet.

Curtis Brown

Decolonizing Architecture

Sarah-Neel Smith

Thwack!

From 1892 to 1946, India’s premier cricket tournament was fought on the pitch by a pantheon of adversaries: the British, the Hindoos, the Parsees of the Zoroastrian Cricket Club, the Muslims of the Mohammedan Gymkhana, and, as of 1937, a team called “The Rest,” made up of Buddhists, Jews, and Indian Christians.

Anna Della Subin

Happy Meal

Dan DeNorch

Karthik Pandian

Arthur Ou

Nicky Nodjoumi

Murtaza Vali

Previews

Bidoun

Inglorious Bustards

What, exactly, is a sport? An organized competition? War by any other name?

Meera Subramanian

Excursions in the Dark

Kaya Behkalam

My Siamese Leg

Exercise was our father demanding that we fetch a Sidney Bechet album from a pile of records, or yet another book from his bedroom at the other end of our vast, lugubrious house, which had once been the German embassy.

Gini Alhadeff

Letter to the Editors

Sohrab Mohebbi

Pouran Jinchi

Natasha Roje

Short Takes

Bidoun

Cairo Biennial

On the Cairo Biennial.

Clare Davies

Mind Games

Magic: the Gathering is the best game.

Christian Rudder

Malaysiana

Personally, he said, he found the whole business of awarding pins, medals, and plaques a frivolity.

Farihah Zaman

You Are the Expert

Sohrab Mohebbi

Keeping Up with the Khordadian

Since the 1980s, Khordadian has built up a dance and exercise and dance-as-exercise career that has made him the most famous Iranian mail-order entertainer on earth, beloved for his camp renditions of everything from Iranian folk dance to Arabian belly dance to American jazzercise.

Negar Azimi

Jill Magid / Natascha Sadr Haghighian

Media Farzin

Cooking with Kamal Mouzawak

Kamal Mouzawak is the food czar of Beirut.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Shadi Habib Allah

Jennifer Krasinski

Parastou Forouhar

Guy Mannes-Abbott

Armen Eloyan

“Putting together a good painting is like putting together a good joke.”

Negar Azimi

Whirling in the West

It was foreordained: a veritable princess of the underground, in a grand act of renunciation, became a faqir, a pilgrim, and a stranger. And then she died, in a manner of speaking...

Alexander Keefe

Ammar Al Beik

Anneke Lenssen

Letter from the Editor

Bidoun

Dreams that Matter

Every Wednesday night from the years 2001 to 2003, millions of Egyptians would tune into Channel 3 on national television to watch Ru’a, a popular talk show in which audiences would intently listen in as callers would, in great detail, retell their dreams.

Anna Della Subin

Previews

Bidoun

Short Takes

Bidoun

Save the Babes

Most every aspiring beauty queen hopes for world peace. Nazanin Afshin-Jam is more specific.

Lisa Farjam

Exposure 2010

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Invisible Publics

Clare Davies

Juicing the Global Jukebox

The video for “Citizens of the World” begins with a helicopter-mounted camera breaking through the clouds and descending toward the dreary grid of Los Angeles.

Alexander Provan

Storytelling

The Jahliyya, or “Age of Ignorance,” that predated the rise of Islam has all the necessary ingredients for a sweeping historical fantasy or epic role-playing game.

Anand Balakrishnan

Best Dad Ever

Doctor Mutawa, an affably serious thirty-nine-year-old with dark, floppy curls and a salt-and-pepper five o’clock shadow, has been called one of “The Most Influential Muslims in the World"...

The Artist-Bureaucrat Speaks

“The painting is a piece of shit,” said Mohsen Shaalan, head of Egypt’s Fine Art Sector.

Clare Davies

The Math of Khan

The voice belongs to Salman Kahn, who wants to pulverize every last ossified notion you’ve ever had about education.

Par Parekh

Left Behind

At St Joseph’s Boys’ High School in Bangalore, where I was a student in the late 1990s, the Tamil Brahmins ate curd rice in small groups, eschewed sports, dressed neatly, and raised their hands milliseconds faster than anyone else.

Ryan Lobo

The iWonk

In August 2008, Bloomberg News accidentally published a seventeen-page obituary for Steve Jobs.

Anna Della Subin

The Clash of Images

In this Borgesian set of very short, short stories that are part memoir, part fable, part criticism, a young Abdallah, who serves as the central character through most of the stories, comes of age in a small unnamed town on the coast of Morocco.

Yasmine El Rashidi

Updates

Bidoun

Hrair Sarkissian

Hrair Sarkissian’s best-known work to date is a series of large color photographs depicting empty streets in early morning light.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Francis Alÿs

Ghalya Saadawi

Space Oddity

The fifty-nine-year-old, who has the distinction of being Malaysia’s first astrophysicist, looks a bit like the result of an encounter between E.T. and a more subdued Yoko Ono.

Yasmine Seale

Manifesta 8

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Potenco Al La Homoj

In 1887, a young Russian eye doctor named Ludwig Zamenhof published the first grammar of his Universal Language under the pseudonym Docktoro Esperanto (Doctor Hopeful).

Benjamin Tiven

Mujahidude

He is an army of one dreaming of the Islamic Renaissance to come, a pious poster boy, hero, and self-help coach to millions.

Negar Azimi

Ming Wong

A Chinese expatriate raised in Singapore, educated in the United Kingdom, and now a resident of Berlin, Wong has tugged at his own itinerancy in crafting a distinct body of work over the last decade.

Shanay Jhaveri

LBGTKYRGYZ

I was born in Kyrgyzstan. In our Asian culture, there are very strict gender boundaries. Someone born male has to stay a man.

Quince Mountain

Prodigy

Alexander Provan

The Paradise Flycatcher

In February 1961, the Newsletter for Birdwatchers was two years old and its founder-editor, Zafar Futehally, was on a roll.

Achal Prabhala

The Adventures of Superadobe

Nader Khalili’s thirty-year quest for an architecture that could house the world’s poor culminated in an idea he called Superadobe.

Brian Ackley

Miljohn Ruperto

When Cooper finally made her way to Hollywood in 1940, she found no more than thirteen bit parts — amounting to a total of sixteen and a half known onscreen minutes — before her suicide two decades later.

Aram Moshayedi

Revolution by Design

One of the oddest chapters in the annals of the Cold War was its proxy war by magazine, and the oddest Cold War magazine was undoubtedly Tricontinental.

Babak Radboy

Invitation to a Sunset

In the India of my growing up, Red Russians were our white people.

Achal Prabhala

Mondo Aramco

Founded in 1949 by the New York–based public relations department of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), Aramco World is the oldest English-language arts and culture publication in the Middle East

Walid Raad and the Atlas Group

Walid Raad, the driving force behind an organization called the Atlas Group, has a knack for tricks.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

How's Business: Abdelaziz Aouragh

Shumon Basar

Amir Mogharabi

Kevin McGarry

Untitled Tracks

Alexander Provan

Apocalypse Avatar

The latest heir to Cotton Mather’s tale of moral tribulation on the frontier is James Cameron’s roundly acclaimed, two-billion-dollar grossing, wholly ridiculous science fiction film Avatar.

Gary Dauphin

How's Business: M.

Elizabeth Rubin

Have Pamphlet, Will Travel

An informal circuit of poets, essayists, explorers, magicians, and gurus, as well as reams of flyers, posters, and pamphlets produced to promote them.

Gary Dauphin

Ashlaa/In Pieces

Sean Gullette

How's Business: Writer, New York City

There was talk of movie rights. My agent wrote a note to one editor saying he thought the appeal of the book was “deep,” and that the fact that it was as yet “unreported” made it all the more appealing.

Gini Alhadeff

How's Business: Ali-Ashkeb Gasanov

Nadja Korinth

Home Works 5

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

This Brand is Your Brand

Were Latvia, Armenia, and Poland all just sold the same kit or did they jostle around to end up with the same crap magic marker pallet?

Latiffeh Ehteshami, Sophia Al-Maria, Andy Pressman, Nelson Harst, Babak Radboy, Shumon Basar, Parag Khanna

Public Information Department

Bidoun

The Serpent Rolled Up

Bidoun

The Strong Horse

Issandr El Amrani

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

Georges Hénein

Elad Lassry

Aram Moshayedi

Tayy El Khiyaam

Ursula Lindsey

Don't Believe the Hypernova

Pink Floyd is so big. And Dire Straits.

Bidoun

The Storyteller

Murtaza Vali

How's Business: Pooja Sawlani

Kevin Jones

Magazine Bazaar

If you have nothing more exciting to do, join me for a spot of lion hunting in Africa this season.

Alexander Provan

Mike Nelson

Media Farzin

How's Business: Abdul Raheem

Ryan Lobo

Magazine Bazaar

Chris Kraus

How's Business: Abou Tarek

Ayman Ramadan

The Bead Thief

A good theft is “artistic,” according to my father. “Sometimes you have to get up, run off, put the misbah in your car, and dash back before anyone notices. So that when they ask to look in your pockets, they’re empty.”

Fatima Al Qadiri

How's Business: Tarek Wazef

Tom Francis

Group Material

Sam Thorne

How's Business: George Russell

Meera Subramanian

Yto Barrada / Etel Adnan

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The Primitive

Bidoun

Letter from the Editor

Lisa Farjam

Magazine Bazaar

Christopher Lopez-Thomas

Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum

Sarah Rifky

Magazine Bazaar

I can tell you that after making my way through 235 haunted houses... nothing scares people like a chainsaw.

Bidoun Updates

Bidoun

How's Business: Don Sakai

Kate Wolf

Short Takes

Bidoun

How to Write About Africa II

Bono sent a book of poems. Someone wrote an essay, “How to Write about Afghanistan.” I shook hands with, not one, but two European presidents, who read my text and shook their heads: How bad, how very bad.

Binyavanga Wainaina

How's Business: Vazeer Ahmed

Ryan Lobo

Whitney Biennial

Zachary Hooker

How's Business: Naguib

Issandr El Amrani

Ahmet Ögüt

Jennifer Krasinski

How's Business: Moussa Barbar

Vartan Avakian

Mohamed Soueid

Like a detective or therapist, he waits, listens, and takes his time.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

White Masks

Suzy Hansen

How to Wreck a Nice Beach

Alexander Provan

Previews

Bidoun

Walk On My Eyes

Bidoun

The Sucker

Bidoun

Freedom of Expression

Boru O’Brien O’Connell

Hungry Ghosts

Dipping a toe into the world of luck and frank appraisal.

Lawrence Osborne

The Golden Compass

How to topple Western finance and unite a fractured faith.

Alexander Provan

Harun Farocki

Ghalya Saadawi

Pleasure for the Eyes

When a love of ornament finds purchase in hard modernity.

Gini Alhadeff

Haris Epaminonda

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Footnotes in Gaza

Alexander Provan

Emily Jacir

Media Farzin

Omer Fast

Emily Speers Mears

3rd Riwaq Biennale

Beth Stryker

Disorientation II: The Rise and Fall of Arab Cities

Brian Ackley

Wael Shawky

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Sangak Nation

Not quite the same as Whole Foods, Wholesome Choice is owned by an Iranian, “Mike” Mokhtare, a veteran food importer from Tabriz.

Latiffeh Ehteshami

Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune

Sam Thorne

The Omega Man

Sometime, in another life, in another world, he danced in the nightclubs of Khartoum.

Nadja Korinth

Short Takes

Bidoun

Cairo Swan Song / Life Is More Beautiful than Paradise

Ursula Lindsey

American Writers in Istanbul

Suzy Hansen

Manifesta

Nav Haq

Previews

Bidoun

The Jerusalem Syndrome

Suzanne Cotter

Identity Bazaar

Four takedowns of opportunism, art world hustle, and shameless dilettantism.

Nav Haq, Sherif El Azma, Nida Ghouse, Mahmoud Khaled, Hassan Khan

Freedom Rhythm & Sound

Mike McGonigal

Forms of Compensation

Ayman Ramadan, Babak Radboy

Marwan Rechmaoui

He does not write texts, collect photographs, make videos, or stage performances. He insists that his objects speak for themselves.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Arabia on the Turkey

Destination tourism and Algerian nationalism in small-town Iowa.

Adam John Waterman

Rasht 29

Rasht 29 soon became a popular destination for “discerning” tourists and flower children on the trail to India or Katmandu.

Sohrab Mohebbi

Lord of the Drone

The emergence and unclear history of North India's avant-garde singer-saint.

Alexander Keefe

Culture in the Wake of the Kuwaiti Oil Boom

Before Doha, Dubai, or Abu Dhabi, the city with the boldest ambitions in the Gulf may have been Kuwait.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Fatima Al Qadiri

Fluffy Farhad

Neon-lit coffee shops with confusingly exotic names such as GRAFFITI and LATEX opened on every block.

Negar Azimi

H. Musavi Khamenei

If the Western artist speaks of domination over material, technique, and space in his work, like a hiker on top of a mountain, in the art of the East it is exploration, intimacy, growth and expansion, and unification with the world that we see and live in.

Sohrab Mohebbi, Clifford Borress

LP

Listening to LP is like catching your breath while shuffling through a trove of your parents’ snapshots — how young and beautiful they are! How little they know of what’s to come.

Gary Dauphin

Kuwaiti Kar Krash

Sophia Al-Maria

True Dub

The American accent combined a rubbery tongue with nasal exhalations, and we all imitated it. Only rarely did we say anything meaningful; mostly we just made up the words. We twanged as a posture, and that was meaning enough.

Abou Farman

The East, the West, and Sex

But Bernstein is not content to tread the rose gardens of Topkapi, lamenting the wet dreams of yesteryear.

Scott Long

Noise Education

Once I had the poison in the blood, I looked for anything different, anything “anti.”

Cevdet Erek

Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai

Sarah-Neel Smith

Satellite of Hob

Want to take the pulse of the Arab street? Don’t talk to the cab driver, watch TV.

Sophia Al-Maria

This Charmless Man

I refrained from suggesting that maybe the British should try having a civil war or two, or perhaps a bombing by the Israelis, if they really wanted to go green.

Lina Mounzer

Nasreen Mohamedi

Mohamedi’s writings describe volcanoes of restlessness and despair, which she converted with supreme concentration into lines and spaces.

Guy Mannes-Abbott

Destiny for Dinner

The most interesting fortune-teller I ever met was a lapsed Jesuit who converted to Islam and who didn’t, strictly speaking, tell fortunes but rather enumerated one’s “masks.”

Gini Alhadeff

Serhat Köksal

His aesthetic is perhaps best embodied by the 2/5BZ website, a massive tangle of information that looks like a primitive MySpace page plastered over a Bulletin Board System laced with punk flyers.

Alexander Provan

Noise Education

I remember being at a friend’s house and discovering that her father had this tape called Bitches Brew, and I just stole it.

Hassan Khan

Video Works

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Hito Steyerl

Max Bach

11th Istanbul Biennial

Sarah-Neel Smith

Tone Poem

When she woke, it was to the smell of death.

Sophia Al-Maria

Made in Iran

Xerxes Cook

Transmissions

Recording and collaging radio broadcasts became an inseparable part of traveling. A similar impulse led me to create books.

Alan Bishop

Alessandro Yazbek & Media Farzin's “Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect”

Negar Azimi

Photography and Egypt

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Abnaa Al Gebelawi

In Farghali’s latest and greatest work, we face the prospect of a world without literature.

Youssef Rakha

Recent and Upcoming Happenings

Bidoun

Short Takes

Bidoun

Boy Talk

A man could literally live in a hole, but if he was capable of renting a really fancy sports car, he could get a lot of girls. So it would make sense for him to put his email address on the car.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Noise Education

When we heard that band Half Japanese for the first time? Music where you couldn’t quite tell the mental state of the people making it? That childlike shouting over horrible noise? We were like, “Perfect.”

Kelefa Sanneh, Jace Clayton

Letter to the Editor

Indeed, it will be a great disappointment if his ******* is still attached to his body, but there are a lot of other things that my article could touch upon.

Anand Balakrishnan

Rosalind Nashashibi

Ghalya Saadawi

Previews

Bidoun

The Pick 4

Clare Davies

Guy Tillim

Benjamin Tiven

Iran Inside Out

The story began, as good art narratives so often do, with a toilet in a museum.

Media Farzin

Enterprise Square USA

Beyond the Hall of Giants lay the Remarkable Supply Shop for Demanding Donut Dunkers, an interactive display staffed by a student worker.

William E. Jones

Static

what you are really struggling with here is your fear of connecting your emotional and somewhat insecure (fair enough, we all are) political attachment to these events, to your professional profile as a cutting edge fanzine made by really cool dudes.

Bidoun

Driving Miss Deneuve

She meets him for the first time in the morning and that night introduces him as a friend, smiling her legendarily blank yet overpowering smile at him.

Gary Dauphin

Twilight of the Iron Sheik

Like Bon Jovi, Margaret Thatcher, and Don Johnson, the Iron Sheik was a pure product of the 1980s.

Negar Azimi

One Star is Enough to Make a Cosmos

It was at the One Hotel that the Italian conceived his most celebrated and emblematic artworks, the Mappa, a series of embroidered maps of the world.

Tom Francis

The Toughest Man in Cairo Versus The Zionist Vegetable

If he had a son, things would be easier. But Kamal has not been so lucky. He's been trying to have a son for years. He tries every night, he told me.

Anand Balakrishnan

Thirty-One Flavors of Death

Places that only existed for me through newspaper accounts of Taliban strongholds were repopulated with lecherous beast-ladies hell-bent on plunder.

Achal Prabhala

On Albert Lamorisse's The Lovers’ Wind

The film was rejected by the Shah's Ministry of Art and Culture. Lamorisse’s film was too soft-spoken, too folkloric; crucially, it showed none of Iran’s industrial triumphs.

Latiffeh Ehteshami, Lucy Raven

The Future Takes Forever

“If it is natural to die then the hell with nature. Why submit to its tyranny? We must rise above nature. We must refuse to die.”

Benjamin Tiven

Revolution For Kids

What we wanted were rats, dogs that looked like the ones you see walking down the street, cats smoking cigarettes.

Mohieddin Ellabbad, Hassan Khan, Nawal Traboulsi

Revolution For Kids

What we wanted were rats, dogs that looked like the ones you see walking down the street, cats smoking cigarettes.

Mohieddin Ellabbad, Hassan Khan, Nawal Traboulsi

A Portrait of the Jihadist as a White Negro

What happened at Abu Ghraib was in essence political and racial, not sexual.

Gary Dauphin

Saâdane Afif

Afif doesn't employ participation as a megaphone through which to prate about wooly notions of democracy.

Tom Morton

A Conversation with Alaa Abd El Fattah

"Are the authorities right to fear bloggers?" Activism, blogging, and imprisonment in Egypt.

Ahdaf Soueif

Muslin Gaze

Every “transgressive” band needed an outrage, and Muslimgauze's album covers were neither more nor less meaningful than anyone else’s.

Jace Clayton

1+1=3

It is almost impossible to imagine it otherwise, to conceive of what New York would look like if United Airlines Flight 175 had missed its target. If the monument to the WTC were a single tower, forever mourning its absent twin.

Babak Radboy

Shahryar Nashat's Plaque (Slab)

Nashat's original inspiration was the freeform conceptual legacy of Canadian musician and composer Glenn Gould (1932-1982).

Dominic Eichler

The Fifth Element

In Genesis glorie attends to the crosser of borders, the exile. It belongs to the immigrant, with his neatly tended warehouse of wheat.

Gary Dauphin

In the Beginning There was Souffles

Its trademark cover, emblazoned with an intense black sun, radiated rebellion.

Issandr El Amrani

A Conversation with Eliana Benador

If you see a “political adviser” on Fox News suggesting that Israel hasn’t gone far enough in its attacks on Hizbullah, there’s a good possibility that the appearance has been engineered by Mrs. Benador.

George Pendle

A Conversation with Elaine Scarry

Facing this figure of almost Dickensian benevolence, it can take a moment to sink in that she’s correcting you. Sometimes it takes more than a moment.

Curtis Brown

A Conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum

I’m ready to talk politics and poetry and everything else under the sun. I got splinters on my butt-cheeks from sitting so long on this bench. And then the splinters got infected. I was worried I’d have to amputate flesh gobbets.

Bruce Hainley

Paths of Glory

I danced at their wedding with extra abandon, having dodged the fastest bullet of my young, eligible life.

Sophia Al-Maria

Ziad Antar

No artist in Lebanon is creating video pieces as unfettered by context as Antar.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Mingering Mike Superstar

While black musicians from Count Basie to Duke Ellington to Prince Paul have brashly adopted self-aggrandizing new names, Mingering Mike gave himself a moniker that sounds like a schoolyard insult.

Sukhdev Sandhu

White Wash

Kärcher Photo

The Road To Wellville

At 10am, the medical portion of the treatment begins with an enema. (At Jindal, nature never calls; it is summoned).

Achal Prabhala

Tarek Zaki's Monument X

You've seen monuments like this before.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Sign of Allah

Allah's mighty tag can be found in the froth of the sea and the pulp of the tomato, in the wool of the lamb and the rubber of the Nike.

Sophia Al-Maria

The Headlace of Xerxes

Xerxes has a certain joyfully swishy quality, taking languorous sniffs of Leonidas's scalp when they meet to parley, wearing clear lip gloss, and dressing like the sartorial stepchild of Liberace and Dhalsim from Street Fighter II.

Tom Morton

Naguib Mahfouz's White Linen Suit

It turns out that meeting a Nobel laureate is far easier than meeting a washed-up and possibly castrated pop star. The difficult part is figuring out what to wear.

Anand Balakrishnan

Rosalind Nashashibi

Jung once said that mythologizing “gives existence a glamour we wouldn’t want to be without.” Nashashibi seems to agree.

Will Bradley

His Dark Materials

In Wael Shawky's Telematch series, the Egyptian-born artist revisits a German game show originally broadcast and widely syndicated during the 1970s.

Gary Dauphin

Slavs & Tatars

It began as a love story. An Iranian raised in Texas and living in Moscow meets a Pole who lives in London. As with the best romances, they meet at a barbecue in Paris.

Negar Azimi

The Education of Lee Boyd Malvo

The plan was to create an army of black "super children": seventy boys and seventy girls who would flood into the United States from a secret compound in Canada to combat racial injustice and build a more perfect society from the bottom up.

Alexander Provan

Jasmine on the Muzzle

In April 2001, Mei Shigenobu set foot in Japan for the first time. The daughter of an unnamed Palestinian militant and one of the most wanted terrorists in Japanese history, Mei cut an iconic figure.

Yutaka Sho

Daniyal Mueenuddin

But listening to him talk about the farm and the workers and the soap opera shenanigans that go on, and how they’re connected to the political ruling class, I kept thinking of Levin, the philosopher farmer of Anna Karenina, who was something of a self-portrait of Tolstoy.

Elizabeth Rubin

James Thornett

James Thornett established the Baghdad Country Club in the Green Zone in 2004.

Alexander Provan

Strike the Empire Back

Michael Rakowitz

Am I Pink?

Vartan the Brave is a warrior’s name. His name is red and he is a saint.

Vartan Avakian

Zaki Nusseibeh

For as long as there has been a United Arab Emirates, Zaki Nusseibeh has been by the side of its leader.

Jonathan Shainin

Michael Stevenson

Conspiracies. In a way, I think we all believe in them.

Nav Haq

Alexander Siddig

The setting for our encounter could not have been more English.

Jamal Mahjoub

Vegan Jihad: A Conversation with Sean Muttaqi

Kelefa Sanneh

Children of War: Kuwait

Fatima Al Qadiri and Khalid Al Gharaballi were kids when Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. In January 1991 an American-led coalition initiated Operation Desert Storm with airstrikes on Iraqi army positions in both countries.

Fatima Al Qadiri, Khalid Al Gharaballi

Some Things Can Not Be Made in China

On June 29th, 1986, our neighbors gathered in our home-war-shelter. The electricity had gone out, and our shelter had the only battery-operated color TV in the neighborhood.

Vartan Avakian

Sherif El-Azma

Sherif El-Azma’s career up to this point, as an artist and experimental filmmaker, is bookended by two works that are formally very different but, thematically, seamlessly connected.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The Girl in the Red Beret

I still remember the first time I saw her. I was on my way to school in Ammo Mohammad’s carpool.

Lina Mounzer

Crossdressing

Simona Schneider

Giorgio Agamben

"I am an animal, even if I belong to a species that lives in unnatural conditions. And it seems to me at times that animals regard me with compassion. I’m touched by this, and feel something akin to shame every time an animal looks at me."

Leland de la Durantaye

Harry Potter and the Rim of Fire

Tom Morton

Beirut Every Other Day

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Islam and the West

Leland de la Durantaye

Rice Pudding For Two

Sahar Mandour

Arabic Sign Language

Sophia Al-Maria

Arabic as a Second Language

I first heard the Arabic word for “vibrator” by the ice cream machine in a cafeteria at Middlebury College.

Negar Azimi

Sweet Sixteen

The first time I ever saw a giraffe was at Khaled’s house. He had gotten one for his birthday, along with a snow leopard that I was told was bordering on extinction and some kind of monkey that wouldn’t stop screaming.

Lisa Farjam

Pow Wow Wow

The story of “the permanent exhibition of arts and crafts and cultural heritage of the captives of the holy war and their ways of living, hygiene, and treatment,” goes back to the early years of the Iran-Iraq war...

Vahid Zare Zade

Human Conditions

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Cold War Modern

Shumon Basar

Letter from the Editor

Lisa Farjam

Mohamed Makiya

Mohamed Makiya’s mother used to say that her son was born the year the British entered Baghdad, which puts his birthday sometime around 1916.

Guy Mannes-Abbott

Transmission Interrupted

Sam Thorne

Emirati Expressions

Antonia Carver

Etel Adnan

"I accept contradiction when it happens."

Lynne Tillman

Exposure 2009

Jim Quilty

Landscapes. Cityscapes. 1

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Samandal

"Besides your dentist, who reads it?"

Negar Azimi

John Wilcock

"Andy’s idea was to take his tape recorder everywhere and just tape everybody."

Zachary Hooker

Omar Sleiman

"I don’t show them to people, because if I do, they’ll want to buy them, or get them one way or another."

Lana Daher

Hampton Fancher

"She used to laugh at herself because she was so beautiful, all the time I was growing up, and then she became a little old lady, and it was amazing to her."

Gini Alhadeff

Young Syrian Painters

Babak Radboy

Short Takes

Bidoun

Stay Out of My Room

Annabel Mehran

Shahab Fotouhi

Karthik Pandian

Bouboul

In 1988, at a painful moment of the armed conflict in Lebanon, Milia received her first letter.

Sahar Mandour

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Just as Shirley Temple stole Depression-era America’s heart with her lollipop-sweet blond curls and blue eyes, soothing the country’s sorrows over sugar rations and Prohibition, so Lebanon had Remi Bandaly as a symbol of lost innocence in the midst of an ugly civil war.

Lina Mounzer

Children of War: Baghdad

Emad Abdelkarim Ali was fifteen years old when the American invasion of Iraq began.

Emad Abdelkarim Ali

The Turban & the Hat

Hassan Khan

Taipei Biennial

November Paynter

Yael Bartana

Nikki Columbus

Pia Rönicke and Zeynel A. Kizilyaprak

Jason Simon

Previews

Bidoun

Buckminster Fuller

Davey Volner

Solid Gold

Since its debut in the coveted iftar primetime slot in 2006, Freej has emblazoned the diva-like Um Khammas, sporty Um Saeed, tech-savvy Um Allawi, and ditzy Um Saloom onto the hearts and minds of people across the region.

Sophia Al-Maria

Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children & Young Adults

Before there was an Iranian New Wave, there was Kanoon. Founded in 1965 with the blessing of then-queen Farah Diba, the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults — mostly referred to as Kanoon, an abbreviation of the Farsi name — produced books, audiotapes, and films, both animated and live action, for Iranian children from Tehran to Bushehr, Sistan, and Baluchistan.

Bidoun

Walid Raad

Mirene Arsanios

Razing Dubai

Herein lies the future of architecture, the future of urbanism, the future of the future.

Bidoun

Azazeel

Youssef Rakha

Sharjah Biennial 9

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Iran on Paper

Jinoos Taghizadeh

Alejandro Jodorowsky

If the pollution were to end, no one would want to live in those awful buildings without windows. Air conditioning is negating air.

Pedro Reyes

Ghida Fakhry

For several years after 9/11, Al Jazeera was taboo in the US.

Shumon Basar

Banu Cennetoğlu

Travels in the private archive.

Tuning Baghdad

Clare Davies

Sonallah Ibrahim

"Good writers still exist, but their political stands are vague."

Ahmed El Attar

Mohamed Moussalli

From the late 1960s to the 90s, Mohamed Moussalli’s signature graced portraits of nearly every Lebanese political figure.

Zeina Maasri

Mohammed Mrabet

Thousands of Europeans. Español, Français, American. Une salade niçoise.

Sean Gullette

CAMP

On the boundaries of collectives and the litany of one hundred thousand possible “backronyms."

Murtaza Vali

Osama Van Halen

Alexander Provan

Johan Grimonprez & Tom McCarthy

“What terrorists gain, novelists lose.” Or: the media hijacks the hijacker.

Alexander Provan

Lawrence Weiner

I’m not a Frank Capra person, but I like Frank Capra movies.

Babak Radboy

Tony Shafrazi

He’s a wild Persian. He’s totally Armenian. He gave Keith Haring his first solo show.

Bidoun

The Otolith Group

Rayya Badran, Ghalya Saadawi

Short Takes

Bidoun

M.I.A.

The musician Maya Arulpragasam calls Muammar Qaddafi her style icon.

Negar Azimi

My Nanny's Food

Bidoun

Children of War: Beirut

Julien and Gabi Asfour were born and raised in east Beirut, and grew up amid Lebanon’s several civil wars.

Bidoun

Roads Were Open/Roads Were Closed

Antonia Carver

Selim Varol, the Toy Giant

Monihan Monihan

Oshin’s Forelock

But there were not so many heroines for girls in the early years of the Islamic Republic.

Pamela Karimi

The Jerusalem Show Edition 0.1

Reem Fadda

La Galerie qui Bouge

The artists attending began to paint, and when the paint ran out, they used Nescafé.

Kristine Genevive Khouri

Carsten Holler

Sam Thorne

Mounira Al Solh

As viewers, we keep watching to see if some kind of fictional mask will slip to let in the revelatory light of the real — without being quite sure what such a moment would look like.

Charles Esche

Keep Eye On Ball

Throughout the latter half of the 1940s, the reigning champion of squash was a dapper Egyptian by the name of Mahmoud El Karim.

Latiffeh Ehteshami

PhotoCairo 4

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Hobb Beiruti

To Arabs of the vaguely openminded persuasion, Beirut may hold the greatest promise for an alternative urban environment.

Youssef Rakha

Off the Wall

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Cyprien Gaillard

But while the American land artist’s work suggested a future in which nature would reclaim space from manmade structures, Dunepark is an archaeology of the proximate present, with its violence and its complicities, its checklist of things to forget.

Tom Morton

Closer

Mirene Arsanios

Previews

Bidoun

Elad Lassry

Fionn Meade

Norooz Dinner

Bidoun

Flowers in the Desert

Maybe you’ve seen them in Times Square, in Union Square, or on 125th Street. Half a dozen black men dressed like characters out of an old Sinbad movie.

Emily Raboteau

Short Takes

Bidoun

The Making of Falling From Earth

Antonia Carver

A Life Full of Holes

It is 1961 in Tangier, and “a singularly quiet and ungregarious North African Moslem” decides to go to the cinema.

Sean Gullette

Avant Gardening

Yto Barrada

Museum of Islamic Art

Antonia Carver

The Town Tavern

At Naya’s pub — known by regulars as Abu Elie’s — pictures of communists line the walls.

Sahar Mandour

Letter

Els van der Plas

Be the Flower in the Gun

On October 21, 1967, the French photographer Marc Riboud took a series of photographs of a Vietnam War protestor in front of the Pentagon.

Namwali Serpell, Maggie Miller

The Queen

Bassem is a distant relative of Sabah, and, following in her platinum- blond footsteps, he is en route to achieving a comparable stardom.

Wael Lazkani

Ahmed Shawki Museum

During my last visit to Calcutta, I visited the Tagore Palace. It was the closest I could get to the Bengali mystic and poet beyond communing with his poems and paintings.

Anna Boghiguian

In the Middle of the Middle

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Velvet Impact

Shameena awoke, gasping. Her body shuddered in anticipation of a velvet impact that did not arrive.

Alessandra Shahbaz

It Came From The Orient

Celastrus orbiculatus is a woody, deciduous flowering vine better known as “oriental bittersweet.”

Hanna Rose Shell

Radio Muezzin

Hassan Khan

Those Were The Days

I bought my first accordion in Ukraine.

Gregory Warner

Khosrow Hassanzadeh

Haig Aivazian

House of Dodi

They appear to be about fifteen minutes away from slipping off to bed for a night of flashy, trashy sex — of posh lust and poshlust.

Tom Morton

Golden Microphone

The Aloha President

If there is a racial fantasy worthy of consideration, it is not the oft-bruited suggestion that Obama is a Muslim or a Marxist or an Indonesian, but Stanley Dunham’s sly assertion that his grandson was the scion of Hawaiian royalty.

Gary Dauphin

Wolves That Do Not Eat Meat

In a grand reception room, little girls holding candles circle a throng of chanting adults; Kuwaiti men recline in sofas, dazed, smoking what appears to be hashish; and two German shepherds are caressed by the writhing, just-short-of-orgasmic hostess, Soraya.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Avant Gardening

Yto Barrada

Qaddafi's Shades

When it comes to eyewear, the prudent despot opts for something chunky.

George Pendle

Gelito Italian Ice Cream

Bidoun

Irangeles

Bidoun

The Last Rose of Summer

The bougainvillea-draped, marble-tiled, baked-stucco compound where I gave my first blow job. It had been years since I’d spent dusk on a school night sprawled in the gravel and wet grass of one apartment’s back garden, testing out my gag reflex.

Sophia Al-Maria

Nadim Asfar

Mirene Arsanios

The New Normal

Murtaza Vali

Natasha Sadr-Haghigian's Solo Show

Most of Natascha’s past works could be packed up and thrown into a bag.

Ashkan Sepahvand

A Blue Hand

The search for a new guru fueled Ginsberg’s magical, mystical tour through India.

Arshia Sattar

Mitra Tabrizian

Amna Malik

Art Now in Lebanon

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Lair of the Scorpion King

Tom Scocca

Tehran Roundtable

Antonia Carver

Short Takes

Bidoun

Tashkeel

Antonia Carver

The Pitt Rivers Museum

Captain Cook’s second South Seas voyage also appears to have been one big shopping trip.

Emily Speers Mears

Anna Boghiguian

Hassan Khan

Metro

Ahmed Nagy

Shady El Noshokaty's Stammer

Opacity became a kind of medium in its own right, furthering fundamentally formal goals.

Clare Davies

Ayman Ramadan

Nat Muller

Nairy Baghramian

Baghramian herself is far more conspicuous than her work.

Jennifer Allen

Wolves of the Crescent Moon

Sophia Al-Maria

Ali Chitsaz

Shervin Shahamipour

Empathy for the Devil

All I remember was the mooning, hundred-lunged sigh that lifted my physics exam clear off my desk and out of the window.

Lina Mounzer

The Cruel Sea

Pearl divers’ lives are drenched in sorrow, poverty, and tragedy.

Rasha Salti

Beauty as the Beast

She doesn’t flinch; her crazy-eye twitches and her lucent teeth glint in the camera’s light.

Sophia Al-Maria

Previews

Bidoun

Tala Madani

Arthur Ou

Signal and Noise

Zachary Hooker

Tripping the Light Fascistic

Paranoia, the discombobulation of war, the difficulty of recovering authentic experience from the distortions and erasures of the media archive...

Sukhdev Sandhu

I Dream of the Stans

Media Farzin

In the Arab World... Now

We are, after all, living through seismic changes, when undeserving retro-modernists sell for 200K-plus on the Sotheby’s and Christie’s circuit and Dubai continues to beat its chest with a hysterical splurge of dollars.

Hassan Khan

Agropolis Now

The role of architecture is critical, and not just as a sexy container for skyscraping greenhouses.

Brian Ackley

Rania Stephan's The Three Disappearances of Souad Hosni

She played every type imaginable — innocent village girl, sexy secretary, floozy, tart, go-go girl, earnest revolutionary, aging nightmare, and more.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

A Principle of Assumptions

Ozge Ersoy

The Anxious

Stephen Wright

Kuwaiti Slang

Shame! I can see your upper arms, you hussy.

Bidoun

Rocking the Cradle of Civilization

Melechesh takes black metal’s already severe ethno-mythic tendency up several notches; it’s “extreme identity politics."

Ben Harbert

Home Works IV

Charles Merewether

Songs of the Open Road

Ahmet Ögüt

Taj Mahal Hotel

The voluptuous façade billowing like late-Victorian bloomers, still flashing the postcolonial street below.

Kai Friese

Jeffar Khaldi

Isak Berbic

Today is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life

Serkan Taycan

Rogers

Nael Eltoukhy

Christodoulos Panayiotou's Let It Shine

John Lennon could be, well, a bit of a bitch.

Tom Morton

Heavy Metal in Baghdad

Over the course of Heavy Metal we will learn much more about what it means to be a certain kind of transnational North American hipster than about what it means to be an Iraqi metal band.

Gary Dauphin

Chromeo’s David Macklovitch

Around 1999, my girl was like, “Yo, you look stupid. Why you wearing shirts that are too big for you?” And I was like, That’s true, I look like a clown.

Alexander Gartenfeld

Yalo

It is the 1980s in Beirut, and Daniel Jal’u, called Yalo by his friends, is arrested on charges of stalking and raping a woman named Shirin.

Dena Yago

The Mujib Coat

Naeem Mohaiemen

Meeting Points 5

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Bab’ Aziz

At first glance, the film seems like a veritable cornucopia of Oriental exotica. At second glance, too.

Bilge Ebiri

Idrisi Map

Max Rodenbeck

The Pearl Cannon

The barren and the impotent, the debutante and the bachelor, the spinster and the wench — all gathered around the miraculous cannon on Charshanbe Soori.

Sohrab Mohebbi

Biscuit Tin

In this preindustrial fastness, anything that carried a whiff of the busy civilization elsewhere was cherished.

Pankaj Mishra

Anwar Sadat's Pipe

The pipe, Sadat’s most successful bit of stagecraft, conveyed his canny paternal wisdom while delivering a subtle “fuck you” to the Brits, whom he’d beaten at their own game.

Maria Golia

Condoleezza Rice's Ice Skates

For all her storied achievements, there is a sense that what Condi Rice became was a well-heeled warning to prodigies everywhere.

Peter James Hudson

Santé Cigarette Box

The woman on the box had tinted blonde hair that is unlike but also like so many Greek blonde women.

Anna Boghiguian

Hamid Batma's Tabla Drum

Like most Gnawas, Hamid enters a kind of trance when he plays. Unlike most, he never seems to fully exit from it.

Jace Clayton

The Cleaver Sleeve

In 1975, Eldridge Cleaver, having tried his hand at petty crime, insurrectionary sexual assault (so-called), essay writing, public relations, civil rights activism, US presidential politics, and paramilitary training, decided to become a fashion designer.

Gary Dauphin

Metal Desk, Palace of Justice, Brussels, Belgium

Brian Dillon

The Kooler

Pamela Karimi

General Dostum's Clocks

On the wall hung a row of clocks, some round and some square. Each one told a different time.

Serge Michel, Paolo Woods

The Anatomy of Melancholy

An immense, opalescent camel’s stomach hangs inflated behind greasy glass: the strange beauty of an indisputably anachronistic science, proudly presented.

Clare Davies

Metatron's Breastplate

The new being was more powerful than any other angel and as tall as the earth is broad. And he was called... Metatron. The parallels with superhero origin stories are striking; no wonder that the Japanese adopted him as a super-robot.

Peter Trachtenberg

The Telltale Ass

An opened book, spread on a table, has its buttlike qualities.

Bruce Hainley

How to Play Beirut

Rayyane Tabet

At The New Lebanon Hotel, You See Old Lebanon And Smile Quietly

Sahar Mandour

Made in India

The probable result of not creating a South Asian canon is that one will be created for South Asia from the outside — already the institutional wheels are grinding.

Hammad Nasar

What Remains Is Future

The arbiters of contemporary art tend to be averse to supporting projects that can be characterized as “technology for technology’s sake.”

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez

Berber Blanket

At one of the cafes in the modern city, a boy he imagined to be a more beautiful, Berber version of himself came up to him speaking Spanish, then switched to French. The boy bared his teeth, said he wanted to fuck him.

Marco Roth

The Object

The Middle East in its geographical obscurity and geopolitical remove serves as a generous host for inorganic demons and alien relics — a pulp lair for all objects that can be considered insurgent.

Reza Negarestani

Abbas Akhavan's Correspondences

A clean white rag drapes the bottle’s neck like a cockscomb.

Kristina Lee Podesva

Nina Katchadourian

Media Farzin

Hafez Al-Assad's Iron Bladder

The Sphinx of Damascus was ruthless; he was patient. He knew when to hold them, and he could hold them indefinitely.

Rasha Salti

ANC2002.36

Sanchita Balachandran

Nefret-Hur's Toilette

She strokes the fish; for a moment, the tip of her finger rests on its mouth.

Ahdaf Soueif

Carey Young

Ken Okiishi

Afro-Horn

Roland Kirk was a sight to see on the streets of Manhattan: a big blind man lugging a felled forest of burnished horns behind him in a green golf cart. Onstage he’d drape a menagerie around his neck, which he would play simultaneously and in harmony.

Brent Hayes Edwards

My Beating Heart

I hid this disgusting information well. It was bad enough to have a scar that cut me down the middle like a dissected frog.

Lisa Farjam

On Georges Perec’s Un Homme Qui Dort

On and offscreen, in and out of character, Shelly Duvall acts from the outside in, like a puppet master of her own body.

Ken Okiishi

Saddam Hussein's Key to the City of Detroit

This spring, the first-ever Chaldean museum is set to open, which will trace the people’s history from ancient Mesopotamia to the vacant strip malls of outer Detroit.

Rachel Aviv

What's Happening Now?

Malak Helmy

Sabiha Gökcen's Wings

Elizabeth Rubin

Bahman Jalali

Carles Guerra

Myths of the Pavement Wolf

Bidoun

International

Bidoun

Untitled Polaroids

Haris Epaminonda

Ezzeddine Zulfiqar Screams From Beyond The Grave: Save My Daughter Nadia

Bidoun

Beach Reading

Bidoun

Mahma Kan Al Thaman

Fatima Al Qadiri, Khalid Al Gharaballi

Short Takes

Bidoun

Archive Fever

Will Smith

Green Zone / Red Zone

Nat Muller

Life Drawing: Approaches to Figurative Practices

Murtaza Vali

Gurdjieff's Citroën

His driving was very bad indeed, and very dangerous. As one observer noted, he operated his automobile like he was riding a horse.

James Parker

Sorry, Out Of Gas

Yutaka Sho

Objectum-Love At First Sight

As Rilke noted, “Relations of men and things have created confusion in the latter.”

Alexander Provan

The Taqwa Bus

The Taqwacores was a love letter and an indictment and a suicide note all at once, the work of a sometimes-mournful ex-Muslim. Then a funny thing happened.

Deena Chalabi

Freaks of Culture

I looked for the most devastatingly sad places and notions: motels, a highway empty but for a single red car, a lone man on a bridge or sitting on a rock, tunnels, diners, the electric chair, cowboys, racist cartoons, and so on.

Madelon Vriesendorp

Missing Soluch

Max Weiss

Previews

Bidoun

Cooking with Zeina Arida

Bidoun

Raphaël Zarka's Riding Modern Art

Zarka’s images refer us to a more democratic potential within form, encapsulated in the approach of the skateboarders, for whom every surface and every curve is a potential ride.

Suzanne Cotter

Letter from the Editor

What are the Bidounest things in the world?

Lisa Farjam

Kader Attia

Katie Pfohl

The Autobiography of Omar Ibn Said

Katie Pfohl

Black Magic

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Letter From The Editor

Lisa Farjam

Haigazian College Yearbook

Bidoun

The Color Purple

Bidoun

Altneuland

Bidoun

The Lustful Turk

Bidoun

Oriental Sexpotism

Bidoun

No Food, No Drink, Just Muslims on TV

I doubt, globally speaking, that Muslims are especially known for their senses of humor.

Shumon Basar

Stalking With Stories

Natasha Roje

This Necrophilic Strategy Entails Some Risk

Artist William E Jones has made films about a pornstar (Finished), the Southern Californian Latino fans of Morrissey (Is It Really So Strange?) and the unlikely documentary and/ or narrative moments within sex films (v. o.), among other hypnotic and subtle works.

Bruce Hainley

The FM Ferry Experiment

Media Farzin

10th Istanbul Biennial

November Paynter

I'Jaam

Haig Aivazian

Battles of Troy

the greatest battle ever fought between the people of Bulgaria and Mexico.

Krassimir Terziev

HADETU

Egyptian novelist Mahmoud El Wardany’s latest adventure is a risky one.

Sayed Mahmoud

Our Lady of Hizbullah

It is this dynamic of jarring transgression between a booby Western-style pop star and the austere leader of an Islamic militant group that undergirds, in a more subtle fashion, the visual language of Julia Boutros’s famous music video.

Elias Muhanna

Gallery

Shirana Shahbazi, Roman Ondák, Atlas Group

Mongolian Phrase Book

Bidoun

Letter

Bidoun

Desiring Arabs

A statue of Abu Nuwas sits on the Tigris River in the center of American-occupied Baghdad.

Eyad Houssami

Riwaq Bienniale

Sacha Craddock

London is the Place for Me

Amna Malik

The Secret of the Grain, Redacted

Shane Danielsen

Hollow Land

In 1692, the brilliant and eccentric English astronomer Edmund Halley formally presented his fantastical theory that the world was hollow to the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society of London.

Sreemati Mitter

How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool's Joke

Jim Quilty

Port City

Eddie Chambers

Contour 2007

Grant Watson

Childrens Museum

Vadim Fishkin

7UAE Contemporary Art

Antonia Carver

Jean-Luc Moulène

Rayya Badran

Ismail Yasin in the Nuthouse

Essam Zakaria

Peace Descending on the Chariot of War

At the foot of a monument, we are asked to remember something we do not, cannot, know.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

I Will Draw A Star on Vienna's Forehead

Born in an unnamed country, into an unnamed family, Vienna narrates her triumphs (a first kiss stolen while tutoring a boy) and tribulations (he turns out to be gay) as she careens through life, trying and discarding personas like outfits.

fdz

The Seasons of Tell-Al Hejara

Anneke Lenssen

Ornament & Argument

It was a prestigious undertaking for the young Iranian firm, a landmark project that excited the interest of the Shah himself.

Pamela Karimi

Blessed Nimbus Churning

Malak Helmy

Shirana Shahbazi

Brian Kuan Wood

Amir Naderi's The Runner

16th Videobrasil

Marcelo Rezende

Fugere

Haig Aivazian

Recognise

Emily Speers Mears

Letter from the Editor

Bidoun

ONE: Across America

Tex Jernigan

Igalo Institute

Clare Davies

A Glossary of Glory

Bidoun

Memorial to the Iraq War

Nav Haq

Homayoun Sirizi

Sohrab Mohebbi

Documenta 12

Ken Okiishi

Are Auction Houses Moving Onto Gallery Turf? A Roundtable

Antonia Carver

Finding The Third Way

Jinoos Taghizadeh

Presidential Gifts Museum

Hany Darwish

Letter from the Editor

Lisa Farjam

Letter from the Editor

Bidoun

Summer Show

Manjula Padmanabhan

Detourism

Media Farzin

Reloading Images

Sohrab Mohebbi

Oraib Toukan

Nat Muller

New Economy

Brian Kuan Wood

Previews

Bidoun

The Biennale as Urban Reinvention

Charlie Koolhaas

Previews

Bidoun

Cooking with Najmieh Batmanglij

Bidoun

Moving Targets

Bidoun

Sislej Xhafa and the Politics of Perception

The paradoxical invisibility of Europe’s large (and growing) immigrant communities has been a particular focus of Xhafa’s work.

Jacob Proctor

A Forest and a Tree

Christa Denzer

The Politics of Fear

Amna Malik

Loud, Insistent, and Dumb

An aesthetic of reified brutality strangely fitting to the current historical moment is at play in both musical arrangement and the way the voice is treated and used.

Hassan Khan

Chungking Mansions

The guests are, in essence, running the hotel.

Samantha Culp

But Will We Live At All?

Naeem Mohaiemen

Slow Speed

Outside my house, a consumer revolution is turning my country upside down. The revolution is televised. In fact, to a large extent, it is television.

Kai Friese

The American Desert

Bidoun

Fill the Void

Bidoun

The Phony Arab

Bidoun

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

Brian Kuan Wood

Floodlighting

Mona Marzouk

Armenian Kitchen, Armenian National Publishing, 1963

Nav Haq

Tal’aat El Badan

Yasser Abd El Latif

Film Festival Diary

Marleen Dyett, Senem Aytaç

Khalil Rabah

Nav Haq

Sharing Ladders

It is rumored that artists have fabulously large egos, that they are difficult, bitchy and competitive, especially when forced to share the limelight and the space.

Hassan Khan

Mad Love

We lived on Fucking Street, the only street in Hargaisa that had a name.

Nimco Mahamud-Hassan

Dear Catastrophe Architect

Speer’s buildings embodied the jumbled, confused, self-contradictory, and even self-hating relationship with modernity that National Socialism espoused

Benjamin Tiven

Group Tuesday

They call attention to a particular practice — the circulation of texts as an artistic strategy — that has been operative in Beirut for years but has always been overshadowed by video work.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Building Blocs

A selection of gifts for his hosts included traditional Bedouin folk craftwork and pieces of highly geometric, highly modernist Libyan art.

Srdjan Jovanović Weiss

A Dream Deterred

Hakim Bey

Dubai Dubai

Seth Thompson

The Way of the Ostrich

We acquired our reputation in the desert. The most deserted desert in the world, a vast sea rippled with ridges and waves and islands of sand.

Sophia Al-Maria

If Water Is Precious to You

Officially Dry

Bidoun

No Political Significance

Bidoun

The Kiwi

I see a lot of merit in what I call "terminological Birkenstocks."

Tirdad Zolghadr

The Magic Kingdom

Is the Western critic’s disgust with Dubai simply a veiled disgust with the West?

Shumon Basar

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie

Adnan Yıldız

Ramin Haerizadeh

Coco Ferguson

Creative Reckonings

Clare Davies

The Limits of Tolerance

Dutchness on display.

Charles Esche

The Muse of Failure

Son’allah Ibrahim is Egypt’s reigning bard of failure. His stories are comedic without being cheerful, just as the masturbation he inevitably depicts is pleasurable without being fulfilling.

Anand Balakrishnan

Bidoun Armenian Phrase Book

Bidoun

A Defense of Culture

Is culture frivolous in times of hunger and violence?

Omar Al-Qattan

Sharjah Biennial 8

Murtaza Vali

Collapsing Foundations

As he quietly died one night, shutting down his body organ by organ, he dissolved the foundations of the buildings he had spent his life erecting.

Haig Aivazian

Make Everything New

Nader Vossoughian

Body Tech

Always start with protein; front-load your carbs; avoid fast-digesting foods; strike a balance; monitor more than your abs.

Bruce Hainley

The Haggis Samosa

Raga rubs up against dub, Celtic folk, and bhangra. Reggae versions of Scottish ballads are sung.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Highway to Heaven

Here, at Tehran's Atlas Hotel, a wrestling champion and national icon — some would say the great­est Iranian athlete ever — spent his last hours.

Negar Azimi, Sohrab Mohebbi

Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads

If Israel or the Palestinian Authority isn’t sending young talent into Wikipedia, then they ought to be, and almost certainly soon will be.

Curtis Brown

Under the Indigo Dome

Antonia Carver

Sensorium

Jacob Proctor

Previews

Bidoun

Perfect Sound Forever

Kurenniemi’s imaginary future postulates the possibility of science “curing death away” and finding the formula for eternal life by the year 2050.

Mika Taanila

Drill Bits

The drill bit is masculine; it’s about rates of penetration, ROP for short. If the hole is good, it’s said to be “slick” and “gauge.”

Mohamed Mansour

Blue Nile

One single image, in real time, all the time: a young, flirtatious female presenter shot on a bluescreen background.

Sherif El Azma

Glory

We had food fights with the porridge every evening, and the floor would be littered with the clumpy remnants of America’s love.

Binyavanga Wainaina

Going Dutch

Being on time, valuing work, dressing smartly, looking others in the eye, and not making phone calls during job interviews—how to act Dutch.

Eric Fassin

Previews

Bidoun

Indie Blues

Samirah Alkassim

Petrova Gora Memorial Park

David Maljkovic

Yael Bartana's Summer Camp

Emily Speers Mears

Music Always Precedes the News

Bidoun

Conspiracy!

Egypt's Ministry of Culture moves from guardian of culture to decrepit bureaucratic monolith spewing prêt-a-porter molds of sanitized discourse and production.

Mohammed Yousri

Gentleman's Agreement

From Ulysses to Hamlet to Inspector Gadget — not to mention the crucifixion itself: the simple story of a seditious Nazarene getting the Guantanamo treatment has been repeated trillion-fold over the last two thousand years.

Tirdad Zolghadr

Melik Ohanian

Emily Speers Mears

Winter Film Festival Review

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Sarah Mersch

Lens Flare

Antonia Carver

Mohammed al-Riffai

Clare Davies

Free Love, Funny Costumes and a Canal at Suez

We will thus place one foot on the Nile, the other on Jerusalem; our right hand will extend toward Mecca, our left arm will cover Rome and rest against Paris.

Marwa Elshakry

Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran

George Scialabba

Chicago

Youssef Rakha

Kingdom of the Dolls

The wheels on Napoleon’s coach were made from ice cream container lids, and its hubcaps were champagne corks.

Sean Dockray

The Maghreb Connection

Anna Sussman

The Exotic Journey Ends

Barbara Piwowarska

Let Them Eat Laptops

I’ll make a bold proposal and say that in any slum where there is a reasonable amount of literacy, you’ll find local entrepreneurs assem­bling computers at the cheapest price possible.

Park Doing, Bidoun, SJ Klein, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Kaushik Sunder Rajan

Bidune

Had those boys read Dune, they might have thought twice about occupying Iraq. Not least because of the sandworms.

Anand Balakrishnan

Jill Magid

She loved the feeling not only of being followed, not only of seducing systems of power, but of monopolizing the surveillance grid until it ditched its purpose — whatever that was — for an addiction, an obsession, the lady in the red coat.

Elizabeth Rubin

Doctor Know

Young stoners would discuss the mind-blowing power of Allah in all its psychedelic glory while hanging out on the hoods of their parents’ new Regatas.

Haytham El-Wardany, Hassan Khan

Manifest Destiny

Babak Radboy

The Reproduction of Life's Happenings and the Exact Recording, in a Most Astonishing Way, of People's Talks No Matter How Secret and How Far They Were

Bidoun

By Any Normal Standards

Bidoun

Knowing the Thoughts and Dreams

Bidoun

The Predicting Details of Forthcoming Events, No Matter How Difficult of Numerous They Were

Bidoun

Kingdom of the Dolls

The wheels on Napoleon’s coach were made from ice cream container lids, and its hubcaps were champagne corks.

Sean Dockray

The Ability of Speaking an Existing Language

Bidoun

Saving From Death or From Damage to Bodily Injuries…

Bidoun

The Natural Order

Camp Campaign

Media Farzin

Letter from the Editor

From TV, science fiction, and simulation games to oil, canals, and development.

Lisa Farjam

Rokni Haerizadeh

Sohrab Mohebbi

Yama

November Paynter

Disorientalism

All three have talked about the formative experience of feeling embedded in something they couldn't quite comprehend; of not quite understanding their mothers’ native tongues.

Claire Fontaine

Murtaza Vali

Nazgol Ansarinia

Sohrab Mohebbi

Tropical Malaise

Thanks to cheap air travel, the real thing — firsthand experience of genuine exotics — is within easy reach of the European public, and ethnographic museums have lost their curiosity-value.

Mirjam Shatanawi

Gold Rush

Antonia Carver

Akram Zaatari

Belinda Grace Gardner

Yoshua Okon

What could possibly bring together a lineup of talk ­show aficionados, a barbarian/urban setting, and a group of Third Reich devotees?

Magali Arriola

One Life to Live

The Gap and Best Buy have opened virtual showrooms, while thriving markets in virtual real estate and high-end avatar construction have escaped the gravity of 2L's internal economy to land on eBay and PayPal.

Gary Dauphin

Letter from the Editor

Lisa Farjam

The Senegal of the Mind

The Senegalese of the Mind are very fond of Beirut (the Paris of the Middle East), as well as Buenos Aires (the Paris of South America), and Paris (the Paris of France).

Binyavanga Wainaina

Institutional Self-Censorship and Religious Sensitivity

Despite its principal association with repressive regimes, censorship is a recurrent topic of debate within cultural spheres worldwide.

Nav Haq

Previews

Bidoun

Letter from the Editor

Negar Azimi

I Have a Cheap Plastic Camera

Roman Ondák, Maurizio Cattelan

On Tahmineh Milani's Cease Fire

Vahid F. Parsa

Iranian Pop Phenomenon Javad Yassari Caught on Film

One of the very few perks of being an Iranian these days is having the chance to sit back and take a good look at yourself in the mirror. You can find, acknowledge, and accept flaws, or fall in love with parts you like.

Houman Mortazavi

Frieze, Christie’s, and the Dubai Effect

Antonia Carver

Afghans in India and One Hotel's Curious History

Trains run past the hotel’s garden wall all day, the lament of their horns an almost ludicrously sentimental reminder of the histories of exile and homecoming that swirl around the stillness of this unlikely half-acre of New Delhi.

Kai Friese

In Between the Public, the Work, and the Artist: Bojan Sarcevic

David Rych

Schoolgirls Slowly Falling to the Ground

In one of Geneva’s many cafes, a Swiss cultural coordinator once asked me about the upheavals occurring in our “countries” in relation to the published Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that appeared in various publications in Denmark and other European nations.

Yasser Abd El Latif

A Journey Into Beirut's Dark Side

Tony Chakar

How the Art World Prospers by Never Explaining Itself

A friend and colleague, Ellen Langan, once pointed out the dubiousness of our referring to the goings-on of the art market as “the art world.” Ms Langan observed that, indeed, there is no doctor world, no law world, and finance is just called finance. Why don't they exist on their own planets, too?

Mary Blair Taylor

Music Pioneer Halim El-Dabh

He was (as a few biographers have called him) a Zelig-like character, seemingly implicated in almost every modernist project of the 20th century, a maverick or “experimental” artist, who, for reasons rarely elucidated, wasn’t deemed worthy enough to be part of the official narrative of modernism.

Sam Shalabi

Nafas: Beirut

Tom McCarthy

Afterthought

Today’s rumors are characterized not by their valence (favorable or hostile), but rather by their putative relationship to truth.

Tamer El-Leithy

9th Aleppo International Photography Gathering

Wendy Watriss

Liminal Spaces

Shahira Eissa

Sex and Stereotype on the Sub-Continent

Naeem Mohaiemen

Automatic Rumor

Is the United States military trained to interpret images? Have Predator pilots read Sontag, Svetlana Alpers, C S Pierce?

Chris Csikszentmihályi

Introducing Cassius Al Madhloum

“You need to paint apples and beefsteaks. They fill you up, and then you get to sell the paintings, so what you have is art education as food supply, you know what I’m saying?”

Tirdad Zolghadr

Kabul Zoo

In the suburbs of West Kabul, where the worst of the civil war once raged, lies a curious gem. Nestled among buildings still riven with bullet holes is an incongruously smart red-brick entrance bearing the words bagh-e vahshi, literally “wild garden.”

Daniel Metcalfe

A Disclosure

In which the editors collaborate with an artist to commission a newsroom graphic designer to visually render the report of the International Independent Investigation Commission Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1595 (otherwise known as the Mehlis report).

Bidoun

On Failure

Part exhibition, part school, unitednationsplaza was launched with great fanfare last October in Berlin.

Tirdad Zolghadr, Anton Vidokle, Hans Ulrich Obrist

Narges and The Case of Iranian Docudrama

Sohrab Mohebbi

Egyptian Arabic Phrasebook

Bidoun

What Noah Knew

What follows is an abridged version of the speech given by Fred Wolf, a Halliburton representative who spoke at the Lexis-Nexis Catastrophic Loss conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida on May 9, 2006.

The Yes Men

Soda as Politick

Shortly after taking possession of the Golan Heights in June of 1967, Israeli Defense Forces entered the abandoned headquarters of the Syrian Army and in the flush of victory stripped down a Pepsi-Cola marquee — battered but still aloft — and hoisted a gleaming new Coca-Cola sign in its place.

Curtis Brown

Tall Tales in Tehran

When I first moved to Tehran as a journalist in the late 1990s, I was scandalized by the chaos of traffic in the streets. The polluting shared taxis that seemed to hold a monopoly on public transport. I decided to devote one of my first articles to the subway — or lack of it.

Anton Karster

Below the Poverty Line

Fatin Abbas

Adel Abdessemed

Alexandra Cohen

Iran.com — Iranian Art Today

Amanda Coulson

The Hassan Hourani Award

Khaled Hourani

We Heard a Rumor

We started a (fallacious) rumor and sent it traveling across the virtual globe, via networks of phone-lines and email informants...

Nikolaus Hirsch, Michael H Shamberg, Philipp Misselwitz, Aristides Antonas, Tim Rienets, Peter Lang, Ben Aranda, Stephan Trueby, Ines Schaber, Mark Hudson, Linda Samuels, Joseph Grima, Shumon Basar, Raqs Media Collective, Jose Llano, Eleni Axioti

London's Nocturnal Blues

Sukhdev Sandhu

Mahmoud Khaled's Alias Logs In

Bassam El-Baroni

Fake Memoirs and Truth As Style

Few childhood experiences were as torturous to me as going to confession. (What doesn’t a twelve-year-old boy have to confess?) But I was a resourceful child, and before long I had formulated a plan to combat the blushing shame the occasion demanded.

George Pendle

The Case for Independence

I thought to myself the other day that there were way too many curators of contemporary art shows, that they’re multiplying like DJs — anyone can be one, but only a few really know how to make people dance and go crazy.

Sigismond De Vajay

Film Festival Diary

Saeed Taji Farouky, Jim Quilty

Archetypal Intellectuals, Devastated Revolutionaries, Kitsch Mythologies, and a Writer Who Dared to Look at Herself

It is the mid-90s, and I'm sitting in a bar, drinking a cold Stella beer. I am somewhere on the Sinai coast. Next to me, an older man is sitting sipping his whiskey-neat. He looks like someone who works with money...

Hassan Khan

Basim Magdy

Brian Kuan Wood

As if by Magic

Reem Fadda

Debating the Future of Martyrs’ Square

Two months after the Israeli aggression on Lebanon came to an end, New York-based architect Makram elKadi of the international design firm L.E.FT engaged the winners of the Martyrs’ Square competition...

Makram elKadi, Bouki Babalou-Noukaki

The Politics of (Iraqi) Food

Michael Rakowitz

Open Studio Project

Regine Basha

A Conversation with Anna Boghiguian

Cairo scenery, the vicissitudes of the workday, the importance of rest, the difficulty of socializing, and making art for the one percent. "Something old, or ancient, and yet shining from within."

Robert Shapazian

A Conversation with Eyal Danon

On the concept and act of trespassing in Israel and Palestine. "The artist stays on the border, making the act of trespassing a continuous rather than a momentary action. The continuity of the act is a privilege only the artist can have."

Basak Senova

Letter from the Editor

Lisa Farjam

Film Festival Diary

Sheila Whitaker

Moving Walls

Antonia Carver

A Conversation with Dr. Saad Bashir Eskander

Deena Chalabi

The Road to Damascus

Ioannis Mookas

Image War: Contesting Images of Political Conflict

Murtaza Vali

A Conversation with Shahidul Alam

Art, defiance, and the price to be paid: cut phone lines, cancelled exhibitions, and stabbings by unknown assailants. "To be a taxpayer and therefore an accomplice to the most brutal nation on earth does require a lot of redemption!"

Naeem Mohaiemen

Ahlam Shibli

Emily Speers Mears

Around the World in Eighty Days

Nav Haq

A Conversation with Eva Munz

Traveling to North Korea to capture the Confucian simulations of Kim Jong Il — a fervent cineaste, a proponent of intricate rules and regulations, an unparalleled wine collector, a major Mazda fan, and "the producer from hell."

Mauricio Guillen

A Conversation with Orhan Pamuk

On censorship, the crime of publicly denigrating Turkish identity, Orientalism and "posing as a victim," and the pitfalls of being called upon to represent one's country.

Lex ter Braak

A Conversation with Ali-Reza Sami-Azar

The Iranian avant-garde, globalism, museums, and the uneasy relationship between culture and official ideology in the wake of Mohammad Khatami's rule.

Christopher de Bellaigue

Qualities, Being Hidden

John C. Welchman, Mike Kelley

Contemporary Arab Representations Act III (The Iraqi Equation)

Abdellah Karroum

A Conversation with Trevor Paglen

On the use of new media by jihadists, the discovery of secret military bases, extraordinary rendition, and the clandestine circulation of information. "You find aircraft companies whose boards of directors are composed of non-existent people. You find non-existent people who are somehow designed to disappear others."

Thomas Keenan

Previews

Bidoun

The Unveiling of Hishshik Bishshik

Bassem Mansour

A Conversation with Mohammed Fares

"The Russians played me songs by Fayrouz to help me relax!" A former Syrian fighter pilot—one of only two Arabs to have ventured into space—speaks about life in the stars and the lessons he brought home with him.

Hugh Macleod

A Conversation with Khalil Rabah

Somewhere between the hyped-up essentialist consumption of “subversive” work by an ever-hungry art industry and the very serious task of engaging with the issues of Palestinian nationhood and representation.

Mai Abu Eldahab

A Conversation with Homi K. Bhabha

How do you conduct a good interview with a walking institution? Someone who was part of your grad school postcolonial pantheon?

Tirdad Zolghadr

Images of the Middle East

Niels Henriksen

A Conversation with Ahmed Alaidy

How to be famously underground: on literary irreverence, the vernaculars of international consumer culture and Cairo streets, and the fantasies of microbus drivers and their passengers.

Mustafa Zikri

Objects in Conflict, Israeli and Palestinian Stories

Nat Muller

A Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

The most prolific curator of his generation reflects on the impulse to interview and the massive archive that results. "The whole project is a complex dynamic system with feedback loops — a learning system."

Nav Haq

Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East

Hassan Khan

A Conversation with Rem Koolhaas

The future of Middle Eastern cities, the “kinetic elite,” and the changing nature of architects building internationally. "I imagine that at some point an all-encompassing project will fall in our laps."

Markus Miessen

Walead Beshty

Kathryn Garcia

On Palestinian Cinema

Palestine is not a country; it’s not even autonomous. Palestine is only a “situation."

Kamran Rastegar

Sight Seers

"Christianity is the chief purveyor of tourism, and one travels only to visit churches" writes Roland Barthes in Mythologies...

George Pendle

Syria’s National Museum

Hugh Macleod

Sacha Baron Cohen: Borat vs. Kazakhstan

Lambasting the contradictions and exploiting the xenophobia of Americans is all well and good, but is it done at the expense of another culture?

Brian Ackley

Living Only Once

Kamran Rastegar

On Pirates, Statisticians and Cruise Ship Directors

Why is it now snowing in Dubai? Why is The Love Boat so popular in North Korea?

Nader Vossoughian

Attitude

Suzana Milevska

State of the Arts Education

Clare Davies

Hotel Four Seasons Damascus

Hugh Macleod

Damascus Airport

Hugh Macleod

Sixth African Photography Encounters

Didier de Faÿs

Going to Sea in a Sieve

The 1990s were not kind to Paul Bowles, the late American existentialist pre-Beat bohemian guru...

Curtis Brown

Doing Business with the Business World

Today, OSEC is hosting a seminar, “Doing Business with the Arab World”...

Tirdad Zolghadr

New Orleans Land, New Orleans World

Stephen G. Rhodes

Contemporary Curves

Wejdan Almannai

Art Market

Antonia Carver

Oreet Ashery's Travel Diary

Emily Speers Mears

Notes on Watching Syriana and Munich

Saw Syriana as part of a two-part Clooneyathon a friend and I curated, impromptu, when we agreed to forego braving "Bareback Mounthim" opening day because it was playing in Los Angeles only at the nightmare "Art Deco-inspired" Pacific Theaters fourteen-screen cineplex...

Bruce Hainley

Notes on Tehran’s Mehrabad and Imam Khomeini International Airports

Eva Munz

An Artist’s Romp at Art Basel Miami

The opening of Art Basel was awful. There was no open bar...

Fatima Rouissi

Hisham’s Top Ten

Hisham Bharoocha

Tamy Ben-Tor

Mary Blair Taylor

The Pygmies Were Our Compass

In the summer of 2004, the artist Dirk Herzog installed a makeshift travel agency in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood...

Tirdad Zolghadr

Redolent Delusions

"In the spring of the year 18-, the Shah-in-Shah, the great exalted and holy monarch, the absolute ruler and overlord of all the lands of Persia, began to feel a sense of malaise of a kind he had never experienced before"...

Naghmeh Sohrabi

Hotel Carlton Cairo

Bidoun

News

Antonia Carver

Never Forget to Remember

For many tourists, traveling to New York City is a voyage inside the TV. It is a pilgrimage to the mise en scène of countless television series and films...

Ken Okiishi

Mustafa Hulusi

Reading the arts coverage in the papers, or doing the rounds of the galleries, it often seems as if all contemporary artwork produced in Britain is the consequence of an evening the artist spent down at the pub...

Emily Speers Mears

Cautious Radicals

Antonia Carver

Modern Incline Modern Decline

Francesco Bonami

PhotoCairo 3

Clare Davies

Projekt Migration

Nav Haq

Ethnographic Tales

In 2003, Shah Mohammed Rais traveled to the Frankfurt Book Fair to contest the objectivity of an account of his life...

Christopher Pinney

Hotel Naderi Tehran

Negar Azimi

On Good Deeds

Bidoun

Letter from the Editor

Lisa Farjam

Sacha Baron Cohen: Ali G vs. Boutros Boutros Ghali

Ali G is a lad, a white British suburban dude wearing hip hop clothing and jewelry, claiming to be black despite his lily-white face...

Tan Wälchli, Suzanne von Ledebur

Hotel Four Seasons Istanbul

The nicest thing about the Four Seasons Istanbul is that the building once housed a jail, and the off-white pillars in the hallways still show graffiti etchings from the prisoners...

Faouzi Rouissi

Biennial Airways

Serhat Izdaman

Abu Symbol

On May 14, 1964, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, flanked by Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev, exploded a charge near the Nubian city of Aswan to inaugurate the construction of the Aswan High Dam...

Karthik Pandian

Makhmalbaf's Sex and Philosophy Reconsidered

In Sex and Philosophy, Mohsen Makhmalbaf focuses on a dance master who plans a last tango with four of his mistresses...

Kamyar Mohsenin

Homeworks III

Tirdad Zolghadr

Previews

Bidoun

Documents from the Atlas Group Archive

Bryan Biggs

Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo

Michael Winterbottom’s latest film, The Road to Guantanamo (2006), is set in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Cuba...

Coco Ferguson

Swiss Airlines flight from Tehran to Zurich, August 2006

Sitting next to me on my flight from Tehran to Zurich is an elderly couple talking in a Swiss-German dialect I cannot understand, but I make out the terms “Shiraz” and “prostitutes”...

Bidoun

Transcendental Ruckus

Nathan Salsburg

Winter Film Festival Diary

Antonia Carver, Yahia Lababidi

Hotel MIR Moscow

Shirana Shahbazi

The Rumblings of a Conscience

Matthew Carrington

Homeworks III (Another Regard)

Tony Chakar

Thoughts on Kidnapping

When Bidoun suggested I write an article on kidnapping as a form of travel, I assumed they were joking...

Serge Michel

Khartoum's Hotel Acropole

Bureaucracy you thought had died with the Soviet empire flourishes in the deserts of Sudan with a smile and tea...

Elizabeth Rubin

Homo Sapiens Are What They Call Us

Eugene Hütz, Rootsman

Borga Kantürk and Ahmet Ögüt

Erden Kosova

News

Bidoun

Envy as Consumer Credo and Political Temperament

Have you ever compared the marketing value of White Trash to that of Brown Immigrants? In the eyes of those who are neither, the white working class is common, taste-less, ugly, and embarrassing...

Tirdad Zolghadr

Previews

Bidoun

City and Citizenship

Pelin Tan

Nuclear Capabilities Aside

Ducking the election flyers thrust through my car window one evening, I found myself face to face with a shapely midriff.

Coco Ferguson

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art

For some time now, public museums the world over have been implementing their own highly professional, big budget mises en scène of what international-standard contemporary art should look like, usually opting for something comparatively urbane, in a Duchampian wit meets iPod joie de vivre sort of way.

Tirdad Zolghadr

Letter from the Editor

Lisa Farjam

Le Corbusier's Algerian Fantasy

Le Corbusier came to Algiers almost by chance. On the occasion of the centennial celebration of French rule in 1931, a new city plan was unveiled by Henri Prost and the French colonial government...

Brian Ackley

Super Center

Ekbatan may be traumatic architecturally, but its test-tube urbanism proves to be functional within the context of Tehran.

Brian Ackley

If It's Too Bad To Be True, It Could Be Disinformation

Natasha Roje

Feral as in Pigeon

Antonia Carver

Spoiled by the Promise of Brilliance

Antonia Carver

Mehrnaz Afzali's The Red Card

This soap operatic affair, which has captured the attention of millions, began more than three years ago...

Sohrab Mohebbi

Wael Shawky

Wael Shawky’s most recent video work, The Cave (2005), included in the current Istanbul Biennial, features the artist at the center of the frame speaking without pause for eleven minutes.

Mary Blair Taylor

Sub/urbia in Recent Photography

Brian Ackley

Art as European Invention

Charlotte Bydler

Flame Wars

Alaa Abd El Fattah

Medinet Nasr

Nasr (Victory) City, or Medinet Nasr, is one of Cairo’s earliest “satellite cities,” a government-sponsored urban development that originally covered 6,300 feddans (6,539 acres) of desert land along the airport road between Abbasiyya and Heliopolis.

Clare Davies

Terms Falling

Akram Zaatari

Baghdad Deluxe

Yesterday's Utopia

Giant carcasses survive — legacies of abandoned theories — and communities mutate into unexpected forms as daily life within these sites presses on.

Brian Ackley

Studio Incident #1

Clare Davies

He Who Eats Alone Chokes

Envy is as old as desire, and belief in the evil eye has probably been around just as long.

Yahia Lababidi

The Most Fatal Attraction

Sabzian was a complex figure: a troubled loner, he spent the last few years hawking DVDs in Tehran’s south bus terminal.

Coco Ferguson

A Persia More French

Porochista Khakpour

One Day You'll Miss Me

Shirana Shahbazi

Coloring Book

Sener Özmen

Omer Fast

Nav Haq

Remaking Hair in Georgia

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

Envy and Luck

Bilal Khbeiz

How Can You Listen to Those Bastards?

Tirdad Zolghadr, Mahrokh Mostaari

Despotism, Democracy and the Fetish

Drawing as a mode of representation challenges the institutional truth of recorded media. It’s David versus Goliath. Guess who I’m betting on?

Negar Azimi

Youssef Nabil

Antonia Carver

Baltic Triennial 33 1/2

Emily Speers Mears

Responding to War

Four weeks after US President George W. Bush had declared major combat in Iraq to be over, British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, winner of the 1999 Turner prize, was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to “create a work in response to the war in Iraq”...

Tom Holert

Emotional Fields

Sherif El Azma’s video/film Television Pilot for an Egyptian Hostess Soap Opera is brilliant.

Hassan Khan

Bidoun Phrase Book

Bidoun

Thinking Cypress

Amanda Coulson

Land of the Seven Scarves

The Kuchi home is a goat’s wool tarp. Everything happens under there — stories, sex, fights, food.

Elizabeth Rubin

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige on ‘A Perfect Day’

Antonia Carver

California McDreaming

Soheyl Shahsavari

Farewell to an Economy of Generalized Envy

That was how I had intended to begin this afterthought for Bidoun. Then something slightly unexpected happened. I was fired from my job.

Stephen Wright

Mona Hatoum / Sahel al-Hiyari

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The 9th Istanbul Biennial

Charlotte Bydler

Pashmina Power

Nav Haq

Made in Palestine

Alison Bing

Get Out, You Damned One

Bidoun

Martyrs’ Square and the Grand Axis of Beirut

Vatche Boulghourjian

Venice Biennale

Maria Lind

ID Troubles — US Visit / Disappeared in America

Media Farzin

Cooking with Khosrow Hassanzadeh

Bidoun

Iraqi Cops

Bidoun

Risk

John Beagles

Settlement Archaeology

Markus Miessen

Shaaban

Shaaban and I have been playing hide-and-seek over the telephone for some time now, he grumbling and me rambling.

Yahia Lababidi

There Is Art Here, Lower Your Voices

Seçil Yersel, Vasif Kortun

I'm Looking Through You

The first recorded story of a Christian icon is related by the early church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, who tells of the incurable illness of King Abgarus of Edessa.

George Pendle

Kutlug Ataman

Nav Haq

The Art of Aggression

Sarah Gavlak

The United Nations

Negar Azimi, Mary Blair Taylor

Flight 405

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Private Devotion

"And that is the difference between a legend and a star” — he ended his lengthy soliloquy with emphasis...

Negar Azimi

Techno Qur’an

Bidoun

Mr. Lebanon

We’d just finished Saturday lunch, and Nawaf Salam, an author and professor of political science at the American University in Beirut, wanted to try out a theory about the assassination of Rafiq Hariri...

Elizabeth Rubin

How Could It Hurt You When It Looks So Good

Bidoun

Eau La La

Bidoun

Cheese Costs Money

Reading Paul E Erdman’s thriller The Crash of ’79 I couldn't help but sit back and reminisce about the 1970s in Bulgaria. It was a cozy time of relative stability and prosperity...

Luchezar Boyadjiev

In/Visible: Contemporary Art by Arab American Artists

Kate McClellan

75%

Hushidar Mortezaie

Global Epidemic

Mai Abu Eldahab

Hysteria as Form

According to popular legend, Mahmoud Abd El Raziq Affifi, the self-styled Adeeb el Shabbab (writer of youth) exploded into the consciousness of this city sometime in the 1970s, when he paid street kids to lift banners advertising his books at football matches...

Hassan Khan

The New Iraqi Flag

Fawwaz Traboulsi

Leaps of Faith

Max Henry

Serkan Özkaya

Serkan Özkaya can remember copying important works of contemporary art from an early age. With no international art collection of note in Istanbul and no option...

November Paynter

7th Sharjah Biennial

Faouzi Rouissi

For The Poet Has A Butcher's Face and The Butcher A Poet's

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

Changing States

Charlotte Bydler

News

Bidoun

Previews

Bidoun

My Travels with Thomsun

The last time I was in Dubai, a friend told me that 50 Cent had done a concert there a few weeks earlier. This came as a surprise, seeing that the last time hip-hop made a fantastic voyage to the desert, it came in the form of, well, Coolio.

Nima Nabavi

I’m Young and I Need the Money

Joel Bisang

Paradise Now

Alia Rayyan

UAE Top Ten

Antonia Carver

Khosrow Hassanzadeh

Sohrab Mahdavi

Iraq for Dummies

Bidoun

Human Rights as Fetish

Bidoun

Emily Jacir

Lisa Pasquariello

Klartext!

Gabriele Pestanli, Hassan Khan

Cooking with Jehane Noujaim

Bidoun

War Bazaar

Friezes depicting battle plans, the “great crossing [of the Suez Canal]” and acrobatic Pharaohs have all the definition of a much-handled soap bar...

Yahia Lababidi

An Image of Dubai

Kevin Mitchell

Slogans Are Walls That Prevent Misunderstanding

It’s 4 AM and Serhat Köksal and I are standing in a bar off Istiklal in downtown Istanbul. In the background, or rather in the foreground, is a petrifying trip hop remix of “Riders on the Storm.”

Tirdad Zolghadr

Establishment Unwound

Antonia Carver

Permanent Vacation

In the early 1960s, while the rest of the world was busy incubating hippies, fighting with their neighbors, and declaring independence, the small trading post of Dubai was hard at work dredging its Creek...

Brian Ackley

Welcome

Media Farzin

Cairo

Maria Golia

Spring Film Festival Diary

Sherif Abd El Rehim, Alia Rayyan

Shop Like an Egyptian

Bidoun

First Balkan Biennial of Contemporary Art

Luchezar Boyadjiev

Dubai Shopping Festival

Andrew Hammond

Project Misplaced

Houman Mortazavi

Photo48

Diana Allan, Mahmoud Zeidan

Ebony Tower

Nav Haq

Loreta Bilinskaite-Burke

Antonia Carver

Tarek Al-Ghoussein

Jack Persekian

Metropolitan Dubai and the Rise of Architectural Fantasy

George Katodrytis

Dubai Inc.

Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares

Tropical Baroque

When journalist Paul William Roberts interviewed Saddam Hussein in his Baghdad office back in the mid 90s, he went out of his way to comment on the furniture.

Tirdad Zolghadr

Biennalicity Redux

Nav Haq

Paradise Now

Alia Rayyan

Regarding Terror

Jörn Schafaff

Turks

Lawrence Joffe

Tehran Survey

Arash Hanaei, Coco Ferguson, Behrang Samadzadegan

History of the World

Hassan Khan

Sidewalk Magic

Simona Schneider, Yto Barrada

Atatürk

Erden Kosova

Thank God He Wasn't French

I once saw Said give a speech in the sumptuous Grand Ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. It was December of 1997...

Tirdad Zolghadr

The Yacoubian Building

Nestled along downtown Cairo’s busy Talat Haarb Street, the Yacoubian building is easy to miss.

Ursula Lindsey

Yul Brynner

The 1966 film Poppies Are Also Flowers is an international crime thriller that follows the trafficking of opium from the fields of Iran to the mafia distributors of Europe.

Brian Ackley

Summer Film Festival Diary

Antonia Carver

News

Bidoun

Dances with Wolves for Muslims

Ghassan Massoud, Ali Jaafar

If Loving You Is Wrong

Antonia Carver

Yasmeen Al Awadi's Teeyla

Tirdad Zolghadr

The Political Economy of Gloss

In May 2004, India experienced a dramatic political transformation. The Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was defeated...

Christopher Pinney

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution

Nader Vossoughian

Tent-City

Lebanon is the country were the two worlds meet, not the East and the West, but that of the living and that of the dead.

Tony Chakar

Tehran as Movie Panorama

Mazyar Lotfalian

Previews

Bidoun

Taking Photos in Imam Khomeini Square

Negar Azimi

Paved with Good Intentions

Noushin Ahmadi

Music Is Kontagious

Gervase De Wilde

On Edward Said: The Stupidest Word

Right. Well, I should first say that I think that the word “icon” is the stupidest word in our current discourse, and it would be no one poorer if we gave it up.

Christopher Hitchens, Emran Qureshi

Grand Hotel Londra

Constructed in 1892 by the Glavani Family, the Büyük Londra Oteli, or the Grand Hotel de Londres, was considered “the most prestigious establishment in the area of Pera, at that time,” according to one guide.

November Paynter

Stylistic Tourism

Kevin Braddock

Sharjah and Its Biennial

Bilal Khbeiz

Islamic Chic

Malcolm X did it, Cat Stevens did it, and even simpleminded Mike Tyson did it. And if you blinked you might have missed it, but Michael Jackson, too, fell in love with Islam.

Yahia Lababidi

Javad Yasari

Javad Yasari is Iran’s Willie Nelson, and like the country legend, he is the voice of the road. The rhythms of Javad’s music have kept truckers awake across Iran’s deserts for thirty years...

Coco Ferguson, Khosrow Hassanzadeh

Cat Stevens

A young man with wide eyes and skinny, aristocratically mod style stages his elaborate suicide again and again.

Mary Blair Taylor

The Popular That Is Not Pop

The man in the brown corduroy get-up calmly stares back at us from a hot sticky late 70s Cairene summer night. In the return of his gaze we become implicated...

Hassan Khan

Aside from Being Wildly Intelligent

What seems to stun me the most is we’re living in the most politically ridiculous moment in recent American history. Yet at the same time it seems like everyone has these blinders on — collectors are buying painting.

Okwui Enzewor, Michele Maccarone

What’s in a Name?

Bidoun

Kitsch and Kitchen Sink Drama

“There is no monasticism in Islam,” declared the Prophet Mohamed. And yet, that is what Ramadan offers a taste of: daytime renunciation and celibacy.

Yahia Lababidi

Inconvenient Evidence

Rasha Salti

A Conversation with Shahzia Sikander

Negar Azimi

Great Looking

Bidoun

HIMAG.COM

Bidoun

Radical Chic

Tirdad Zolghadr

Natascha Sadr-Haghighian

How to write a profile on an artist whose current intellectual concern is to subvert identity precisely in the “curriculum vitae,” “career profile” sense of the term?

Tirdad Zolghadr

Heavy Metal

Texas wildcatters, Moscow oligarchs, child soldiers in Luanda, Baku belly-dancers, highwaymen in Tbilisi and African dictators. But this was more than we’d hoped for...

Serge Michel

Cola Turka

Basak Ertur

It's Makeover Time, Ladies

Bidoun

Previews

Bidoun

Women Under the Sun

It is uncanny, certainly unbecoming, to claim that a social realm shaped by antiquated segregation of gender should be hailed as the theater for anything life-affirming.

Rasha Salti

Preening Alterity

Softly she then parts her féradje (coat) and offers herself entirely as prey to my gaze.

Irvin Cemil Schick

Roots of Rebellion

It seems that “unconventional” hairstyles are this season’s taboo in the Islamic Republic...

Coco Ferguson

Looking for Ali

In a critical studies course I taught at New York University a few years ago, I showed my students nineteenth and twentieth century American photographs of lynchings...

Lawrence Chua

From Trash Heap to Emerald Lung

There is something Augustinian about the Al Azhar Park in that it evokes a city of God surrounded by a seemingly endless city of Man...

Issandr El Amrani

Architectural Reading

In a city in which cemeteries double as residences, where life and death can occupy the same spaces in myth and reality...

Sadia Shirazi

The Forward Thrust of Christine Tohme

But does the fascination for the Beirut art scene have the same roots as the Champs-Elysées of the Orient?

Tirdad Zolghadr

Lessons from the Boss

Masoud Golsorkhi, founder and editor in chief of Tank teaches Lisa Farjam a thing or two.

Lisa Farjam

Hair Is for Headbanging

A strangely easy coexistence of the macabre and the mundane met us at every juncture as we peered into the Islamic Republic’s metal scene.

Sohrab Mohebbi, Coco Ferguson

Fall Film Festival Diary

Heiko Wimmen, Antonia Carver, Ali Jaafar

I Love Cinema

Ali Jaafar

Gilbert Hage

Jim Quilty

Pinar Yolican

Kelly Taxter

Hashem El Madani

Sacha Craddock

Manima

Manima

Cooking with Ghada & Sahar Amer

Bidoun

Annulé

Bidoun

Streetmusic Arabe

Gervase De Wilde

Boy from Brazil

Alia Rayyan

Little Prince Gets Political

As much as I want to resist it, Prince and Madonna will be forever linked in my mind. The two are linked not only because they made us want to be teen sluts...

Mary Blair Taylor

Ayse Erkmen

Amanda Coulson

Ethnic Marketing

Tan Wälchli

Form Through Light

Lina Attalah

Gardens of Persia; Old Wisdom, New Visions

Kianoosh Vahabi

Amman Meeting Points

Diala Khasawneh

Bonus Miles

“So now the Americans are coming over here to teach us how to be critical.” I was standing outside the US pavilion, featuring Fred Wilson, at the Venice Biennial 2003...

Tirdad Zolghadr

Prime Time Ramadan

Stephanie Keith

Previews

Bidoun

Encounters Between Civilizations

Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares

The Arab Image Foundation

Antonia Carver

Ghassan Zaqtan on Young Palestinian Writers

Bidoun

Film Festival Diary: Cannes, Paris, Ramallah

Antonia Carver, Ali Jaafar, Alia Rayyan

They Shoot Horses

Phil Collins

Susan Hefuna

Bryan Biggs

Manima: A Tale of Two Brothers

Lisa Farjam

Nasser Laham

Alia Rayyan

9th Tehran Photography Biennial

Tirdad Zolghadr

Letter from the Editor

The art of archiving; young men going to war, newlywed couples, women who wanted to be immortalized as beautiful.

Lisa Farjam

Calligraphy

Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares

Collector's Diary

Bidoun

Collector's Diary

Fouad Elkoury

What's in a Name?

Coco Ferguson

Literature in the Balance

Alia Rayyan

On Yousry Nasrallah's ‘Bab Al Chams’

Ali Jaafar

Atash

Ali Jaafar

As Four 101

Porochista Khakpour

Nico, Elvis, Yves Saint Laurent

Cesar Padilla

Cooking with Lisa Farjam

Bidoun

In the Battlefields

Ali Jaafar

Edwar al-Charrat on Egypt's Young Literary Scene

Bidoun

The Amiya/Fussha Dilemma

Iman Humaydan Younes

Cinema RIF

Antonia Carver

A Life Reconstructed

Negar Azimi

Ala Ebtekar