The Garden

No, my apartment wasn’t dirty. Nature is clean. It’s civilization that’s dirty.

The Home Front: On Rahmaneh Rabani and Bahman Kiarostami’s Impasse

Come on! Let them go. Let them go to hell. It’s none of your business.

Fractures in the Medium: Kaveh Akbar and Anahid Nersessian in Conversation

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.

Hash Is a Vegetable

Our folk music is slow, like a soft ocean wave.

A Private Ocean: Iman Mersal and Maru Pabón in Conversation

Why should I add to this archive of nostalgic poems? It would be like grabbing the first fruit in the tree.

Days of Grief: Iran Diary 2

Honestly, I was more than happy to freeze.

Anger Piled Atop Anger: Iran Diary

It’s not entirely clear to me when it all began.

Girl on a Train: Getting Real with Fatima Daas

How do you sit with your ass between two chairs?

Laughter Was Our Inheritance: A Beirut Diary

On February 14, 2005, the day Rafik Hariri was assassinated, I was sent to confession for the first time.

Spirit Riders: A Conversation with Mati Diop and Fatima Al Qadiri

In Dakar, the spirits ride at dusk.

Trump Cocktail

Hello, I’m Hadi and this is my art.

Rude Pieties: Six Glimpses of Hervé Guibert

A possible epitaph? Better to remain hungry than to renounce appetite.

Phoneme Riot: A Conversation with Nour Mobarak

The work of Los Angeles–based artist Nour Mobarak can be understood as an open-ended engagement with the promiscuous and constitutive power of words.

General Behavior

When two gooms get each other.

South of Nothing: The Photographs of Soham Gupta

When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker.

Blasted: On Reza Abdoh’s Tight Right White

He ate camp and shat punk, his style a fizzing intestine stuffed with culture’s slime and scraps.

Bidoun Mix 5: Meriem Bennani

Low-key evil

We Are The Lines of Control: Unraveling Naeem Mohaiemen

Like a kite catching thermal winds.

Matter and Mind

As a child in Tehran, the artist Shirin Sabahi took weekly painting classes not far from Park-e Laleh, or tulip park, in the sprawling city center.

Bidoun Mix 4: Ma’an Abu Taleb

Ma3azefizm

The Night Journey of Ahmed Bouanani

In the stillness of the house at Aït Oumghar there are ghosts of cats.

Book of Judges: Larry David and the War on the War on Comedy

The war of all against all against nothing

Sweet Talk: A Conversation with Thuraya Al-Basqsami and Monira Al Qadiri

I feel like there’s a forest inside me, full of vegetation. Like a bowl of tabbouleh.

Louvre Me Tender

Soft power plays

Bidoun Mix 3: Ghazal

Mix Suedi

The Video People

1990s VHS Tehran Cinephiliacs

Bidoun Mix 2: Deena Abdelwahed

FutureArab/ClubSounds

Soft Dramaturgy: A Conversation with Lukas Duwenhögger, Part II

Precluding the indifferent, eradicating void and uninspiring vastness of, for instance, sunsets.

Soft Dramaturgy: A Conversation with Lukas Duwenhögger, Part I

I hope these words make you cry.

Mary Boone is Egyptian

“I find the whole notion of celebrity embarrassing.”

Ghariba

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

Bidoun Mix 1

Post-(((Persian))) Happy Softcore