Desiring Arabs

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

Eyad Houssami

Gallery

Gallery is a new curatorial space in Bidoun devoted to visualizations of each issue’s theme.

Shirana Shahbazi, Roman Ondák, Trisha Donnelly, Atlas Group

Childrens Museum

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 1997 After an excursion to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, artist Vadim Fishkin invited a group of students, ranging in age from seven to twelve years old, to create their own museums at home, making use of any items that were significant to them.

Vadim Fishkin

Fugere: Refugee Olympics

Haig Aivazian

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

The Limits of Tolerance: Going Dutch at the Van Abbemuseum

Dutchness on display.

Charles Esche

Chungking Mansions: The meta-hotel as micro-city

The guests are, in essence, running the hotel.

Samantha Culp

Floodlighting: Artist Project

Mona Marzouk

Collapsing Foundations: Death and the architect

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

Mad Love: A geography of insanity

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

Nimco Mahamud-Hassan

The Magic Kingdom: How not to think about Dubai

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

Shumon Basar

Loud, Insistent, and Dumb: Shaabiyat and the return of the moulid as charged referent

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

Make Everything New

Over the past couple of years, philosophers and artists have slowly begun to question the doom-and-gloom pessimism that has defined far-left attitudes toward utopia since the end of the Second World War.

Nader Vossoughian

Ramin Haerizadeh: The Melancholy of the Everyday

Flooded by tourists keen on cheap beer and curry, London’s traditional garment district, Brick Lane, is often referred to as “Banglatown” these days, though Bangladeshis are only the most recent arrivals among rolling waves of immigrants.

Coco Ferguson

Sharing Ladders: Notes on the group show as format

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

The Kiwi: On The House of World Cultures, Berlin

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

Tirdad Zolghadr

Group Tuesday: Doubting images

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

The Muse of Failure: Egypt and the grandest narrative

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

Slow Speed: Elegies of underdevelopment

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 Way of the Ostrich: Or, How Not to Resist Modernity

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