House Arab
I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it sparkled on their tongues.
Articles
At the Border of the Night
I saw myself studying law in order to please my father. For comfort, I secretly disappeared into song. And finally, when a choice had to be made, I grew tormented. But my spirit won out in the end.
Naguib Mahfouz
Hot, Horny, Exalted, Free
People at protests are shot as fondly — as ravenously — as a nude, while nudes appear monumental, as if desire itself were a front-page story.
Anahid Nersessian
Outliving the Wolves
‘How dare you interrupt my shoot! Can’t you see these extras have killed me for two hours? I was rehearsing with them for two hours, and now you come and interrupt? This is the best film in the Middle East!’
Momtaza Mehri
The Shit
Not from the pensive, personable face she’d always imagined but from the thick bovine features of a bald troll.
Youssef Rakha
Free Alaa
Alaa was effervescent — jumping around, waving his arms, protesting with his whole body.
Lina Attalah
The Garden
No, my apartment wasn’t dirty. Nature is clean. It’s civilization that’s dirty.
Yasmin Zaher
The Home Front
Come on! Let them go. Let them go to hell. It’s none of your business.
Media Farzin
Fractures in the Medium
I’m trying to describe a cloud from inside the cloud, and you have to be on the ground to see that it’s a giraffe.
Kaveh Akbar, Anahid Nersessian
Hash Is a Vegetable
Our folk music is slow, like a soft ocean wave.
Negar Azimi, Fatima Al Qadiri, Meriem Bennani, Tiffany Malakooti
A Private Ocean
Why should I add to this archive of nostalgic poems? It would be like grabbing the first fruit in the tree.
Maru Pabón, Iman Mersal
Days of Grief
Honestly, I was more than happy to freeze.
S*
روزهای سوگ
س*
س*
Anger Piled Atop Anger
It's not entirely clear to me when it all began.
S*
Girl on a Train
How do you sit with your ass between two chairs?
Momtaza Mehri
Laughter Was Our Inheritance
On February 14, 2005, the day Rafik Hariri was assassinated, I was sent to confession for the first time.
Edwin Nasr
Spirit Riders
In Dakar, the spirits ride at dusk.
Negar Azimi, Fatima Al Qadiri, Mati Diop, Babak Radboy
Trump Cocktail
Hello, I'm Hadi and this is my art.
Hadi Fallahpisheh
Rude Pieties
A possible epitaph? Better to remain hungry than to renounce appetite.
Lia Gangitano, Hedi El Kholti, Bruce Hainley, Moyra Davey, Wayne Koestenbaum, Christine Pichini
Phoneme Riot
“Dear Werner Herzog, I am a very beautiful woman.”
Jace Clayton
General Behavior
When two gooms get each other.
Farah Al Qasimi
South of Nothing
When life's hard, time's a motherfucker.
Sukhdev Sandhu
Blasted
Tobi Haslett
Bidoun Mix 5: Meriem Bennani
Low-key evil
Latiffeh Ehteshami, Meriem Bennani
We Are The Lines of Control
Like a kite catching thermal winds.
Skye Arundhati Thomas
Matter and Mind
Shirin Sabahi
Bidoun Mix 4: Ma’an Abu Taleb
Ma3azefizm
Bidoun
The Night Journey of Ahmed Bouanani
Anna Della Subin
Book of Judges
The war of all against all against nothing
Gary Dauphin
Sweet Talk
I feel like there’s a forest inside me, full of vegetation. Like a bowl of tabbouleh.
Thuraya Al-Baqsami, Monira Al Qadiri
Bidoun Mix 3: Ghazal
Mix Suedi
Latiffeh Ehteshami
Louvre Me Tender
Soft power plays
Rahel Aima
The Video People
1990s VHS Tehran Cinephiliacs
Media Farzin
Bidoun Mix 2: Deena Abdelwahed
FutureArab/ClubSounds
Bidoun
Soft Dramaturgy
Precluding the indifferent, eradicating void and uninspiring vastness of, for instance, sunsets.
Bruce Hainley, Lukas Duwenhögger
Soft Dramaturgy
I hope these words make you cry.
Bruce Hainley, Lukas Duwenhögger
Mary Boone is Egyptian
"I find the whole notion of celebrity embarrassing."
Gini Alhadeff
Ghariba
Love and romance, dating and friendship, loneliness and community, all set against the terror of aging.
Meriem Bennani
Bidoun Mix 1
Post-(((Persian))) Happy Softcore
Bidoun
Trump on Egyptian TV
Bidoun
Laila Soueif
Lina Attalah
Youssef Rakha
May al-Ibrashy
William Wells
Yasmine El Rashidi
The Pasha Resurrects
Muhammad al-Muwaylihi
The Delicacy of Radicalism
Haytham El-Wardany
In all cases, it was a beautiful film to make
Amr Ezzat
Salima Ikram
I mean, if all else fails, I’ll always have butchery. Or I guess I could work in a funeral home.
Negar Azimi
Welcome
For ten years a magazine called Bidoun appeared roughly every once in a while, sometimes four times a year, all over the world, almost never in the same shop twice...
Bidoun
On Small Magazines
A little magazine is like the start of a river.
Etel Adnan
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
Alison Bing
Mediterraneans
Yasser Aggour
LIFT
Leila M
Arab Art Workshop
Malu Halasa
Shelf Life
Tirdad Zolghadr
Opposites Collapse
Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili
Hassan Khan
A young man sits in the last of the downtown cafés that serve both ahwa sada (Turkish coffee) and beer, putting back Egypt’s own version of the latter (Stella) and taking in his surroundings. This is Hassan Khan and this is Cairo — a city marked by the occasional money-laundering sheikh, Prada hippies sipping Italian coffee at the American University, polyester-ed civil servants who swear by Sonallah Ibrahim (Egypt’s Kafka), and the ever-present, meticulously sifted refuse dump.
Bidoun
Letter from the Editor
Lisa Farjam
Going Public
Vasif Kortun
Breathing Room
Shirazeh Houshiary’s latest project Breath, a collaboration with architect and husband Pip Horne, climbs up out of the stone plaza in front of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Battery Park in Lower Manhattan.
Brian Ackley
From the Bronx to Beirut
Ramsay Short
Tunes by DJ Sharif
Bidoun
Poetics of Proximity
Laura J. Kuo
Farhad Moshiri
Media Farzin
Tehran's Classy Clairvoyant
Ms. Shenas
Cooking with Maha Alusi
Bidoun
Alwan for the Arts
Dina Ramadan
Navel Gazing
Mohammad Shirvani's first feature film is an intimate diary that mixes real life and screen life with experimental abandon. Welcome to Big Brother, Iranian style.
Antonia Carver
Previews
Bidoun
Amina Mansour
Bassam El-Baroni
The Transformer: On Tareq Abou El Fetouh
Alia Rayyan
Breathing Room
Shirazeh Houshiary’s latest project Breath, a collaboration with architect and husband Pip Horne, climbs up out of the stone plaza in front of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Battery Park in Lower Manhattan.
Brian Ackley
BerlinBeirut
Bidoun
Head On
A man in his mid-forties sits behind the wheel of an old Mercedes Benz. His expression is both lethargic and empty from alcohol. Cut. The camera follows his excursion from a bird’s eye view. Then — without warning — he drives full throttle against a wall. Head-on collision.
Alia Rayyan
Ejteyah (Invasion)
Antonia Carver
Film in Brief
Bidoun
Manima
Manima
Far Near Distance
Tirdad Zolghadr
Shahram Entekhabi
Alia Rayyan
20th Century British Sculpture
Bidoun
For Bam
Antonia Carver
Dead Dogs
Over the past decade, groups of established and upcoming artists have begun taking their art out of the city’s clutch of contemporary galleries and displaying it instead in houses due for demolition, on the back of trucks circulating the expressways, in old military depots, and in half-built high-rises.
Antonia Carver
From Tehran to Tribeca
Antonia Carver
Meta Music
Bidoun
Beirut's CD-Theque
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
The Drape and the Fold of Rami Kashou
Porochista Khakpour
Another Resolution
Akram Zaatari
Letter to the Editor
Nazlee Radboy
Having a Take