Bidoun is looking for a part-time editor to work with our core team. The editor will commission, develop, and edit pieces, which may include criticism, reportage, memoir, or interviews. Bidoun works on an average of 1-2 books per year and said editor may be asked to weigh in on these, too. Candidates should have several years of magazine, book publishing and/or newspaper experience. Meticulous research, copy editing, and proofreading skills are required, as is a sense of humor. Bidoun is a small, collectively-run organization; the ideal candidate will be familiar with and invested in the project’s sensibility and mission. Salary will begin at 36K & can grow depending on time and experience. Applicants can be based anywhere, as most meetings happen via Zoom, though Bidoun’s core team is located in NYC.
Please send cover letter, CV, and the names and contact information for two referees to info@bidoun.org with subject header “EDITOR.” Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled.
Bidoun is committed to a diverse workplace and is an equal-opportunity employer. We will not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of age, color, disability, gender, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status.
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York
Thursday, September 19 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, September 22 at 3:30
Join us Thursday, September 19 or Sunday, September 22 at the Anthology Film Archives for a very special 35mm screening of Farouk Beloufa’s elliptical political drama Nahla (1979), followed by Jocelyne Saab’s behind-the-scenes documentary On the Set of Nahla (1979)—newly subtitled in English and screening in the US for the first time.
*September 19th screening will be introduced by artist, filmmaker, and progeny, Neïl Beloufa.
Nahla
Farouk Beloufa
1979, 116 min, 35mm
Arabic and French with English subtitles
Archival print courtesy Academy Film Archive
Shot in 1978 but set three years earlier in 1975, Nahla follows the intertwined stories of four characters in Beirut at the onset of the Lebanese Civil War. Nahla, a young singer who loses her voice; her sister Maha, a feminist journalist; Hind, a Palestinian activist who provides a channel to the camps and later joins the resistance; and Larbi, an Algerian journalist caught in the tumult. An elliptically structured political drama, Nahla’s narrative linearity is propelled only by real-life political events: the battle of Kfar Chouba, a meeting between Kissinger and Sadat, the assassinations of Maarouf Saad and Saudi King Faisal, and so on. Co-written with Rachid Boudjedra and produced by Radio Télévision Algérienne, Nahla is the product of a distinct 1970s pan-Arab leftist intellectualism which connected Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine, and beyond. With music composed by Ziad Rahbani, who makes cameos in the film.
On the Set of Nahla
Jocelyne Saab
1979, 27 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Arabic and French with English subtitles
“In the mid-1970s, Algeria was very interested in what was happening in Lebanon, particularly because the PLO headquarters were in Beirut, and the Palestinian issue is a central concern for the Arab world … I remember that some senior leaders of the National Liberation Front (FLN) began to wonder if a kind of civil war similar to the one that ignited Lebanon would come to pass in Algeria. I was invited … to present my documentary at the Cinematheque of Algiers, which was then a hotbed of global cinephilia … I had interesting discussions with Algerian filmmakers, like Farouk Beloufa, who discovered Lebanon through my films. Shortly thereafter, he shot Nahla… . Farouk was fascinated by the freedom of speech and movement and the proliferation of ideas of political parties in Lebanon in the seventies.”
—Jocelyne Saab
A behind-the-scenes documentary in which director Jocelyne Saab engages the cast and crew of Nahla in conversations about the film. With Farouk Beloufa, Yasmine Khlat, Ahmed Mehrez, Jocelyne Saab, Youcef Saïeh, Lina Tebbara, and others.
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York
Sunday, June 30
7:30 pm
Join us on Sunday, June 30 at the Anthology Film Archives for the U.S. premiere of Rahmaneh Rabani and Bahman Kiarostami’s Impasse (2023), a microcosmic documentary about rising religious and political conflicts within one Tehrani family. Remarkable for the candor of its conversations, Impasse intimately captures an Iranian domestic discourse rarely seen on film.
Rahmaneh Rabani, Bahman Kiarostami Impasse
2023, 89 min, DCP
Persian with English subtitles
“Until the age of twenty-two, I was just like the rest of my family, a believer and fully veiled,” says Rahmaneh Rabani, who was raised in an ultra-conservative household in Iran. After a crisis of faith in her early twenties, she diverged from her family’s wishes, especially those of Haj Akbar — the family patriarch — a loyal subject deeply formed by his experiences during the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. After the death of Mahsa Jina Amini at the hands of Iranian authorities in 2022, Rabani participated in anti-regime protests that shook the country. She also began filming her interactions with her observant family, reigniting old conflicts. Produced in collaboration with Bahman Kiarostami, Impasse captures Rabani’s remarkably direct and emotionally-charged conversations with three generations of her own family — parents, siblings, nieces, and in-laws — most of whom remain steadfastly supportive of the government and its mandatory hijab laws. Impasse offers an intimate, tense, and ultimately moving portrait of Iranian society at a critical juncture.
Rahmaneh Rabani is an artist, filmmaker, and editor. Impasse is her first feature.
Bahman Kiarostami is a Tehran-based documentary filmmaker. His most recent film is Fereydoun in Late Summer.
$14 General Admission / $10 Students, Seniors
Tickets available on the Anthology Film Archives website
Over the past months, a growing number of artists, writers, curators, and editors in our midst have been penalized for expressing solidarity with Palestinian life. Exhibitions and artwork sales have been cancelled, fees rescinded, residencies revoked, jobs lost.
Bidoun is collecting information about specific incidences of loss of work and income directly related to Palestinian solidarity among culture workers. Such information is of unequivocal historical import — a crucial window onto cultural life today.
At the same time, we will be making a limited number of microgrants available to support affected individuals.
To those interested, please write to info@bidoun.org by June 15 with subject header SOLIDARITY.
Please include detailed information about the incident in question and your current state.
This initiative is supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Museum of the Moving Image
36-01 35th Ave
Queens, NY
Wednesday, May 8
7 pm
Join us on Wednesday, May 8 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria where we will be co-presenting a screening of Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1981) for the opening night of the Prismatic Ground Festival. Recently restored by the Royal Belgian Film Archive, Khleifi’s first film is a visceral, poetic glimpse of everyday life in the occupied West Bank.
The screening will be preceded by a reading from poet Hala Alyan and followed by a discussion with researcher/writer/curator Adam HajYahia.
Khleifi’s second film, the short documentary Ma'loul Celebrates Its Destruction (1984), will be free to stream for the duration of the festival (May 8–12) on prismaticground.com.
Michel Khleifi Fertile Memory
1981, 99 min, DCP
Arabic with English subtitles
The first feature length film to be shot in the West Bank, Fertile Memory is a portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the dispossession that heavily determines their lives. Romia Farah — the director’s aunt — is a widowed grandmother working in an Israeli garment factory. Her tenacious personality fuels a decades-long legal battle to reclaim her expropriated land. Sahar Khalifa is a feminist writer teaching at Birzeit University; she struggles with the double oppression of Israeli occupation and the gendered ostracization and loneliness she experiences after seeking a divorce. Fertile Memory marks a distinct shift in Palestinian filmmaking, from a unified revolutionary cinema, to a capacious reflection of Palestinian society and its many contradictions, landscapes, and temporalities.
Michel Khleifi Ma'loul Celebrates Its Destruction
1984, 32 min, streaming in HD
Arabic with English subtitles
Once a year, on “Israeli Independence Day” — also known as Nakba day — the former residents of the destroyed Palestinian village of Ma’loul are permitted to enter the ruins of their birthplace. The village, like countless others, was previously a mixed agrarian community of Muslims and Christians. Today, the churches are used to house cattle and garbage for a nearby kibbutz; the military has built a base; and commemorative plaques and trees planted through the Jewish National Fund obfuscate the landscape for those who once knew it intimately. Ma’aloul intercuts scenes of the villagers communing in remembrance with archival footage, along with a depiction of a Palestinian teacher presenting the history of the creation of the state of Israel to his students, as mandated by Israeli curriculum.
Poets in the inaugural “Gaza Reader” include Maya Abu Al Hayat, Zaina Alsous, Fady Joudah, Mahmoud Darwish, Mosab Abu Toha, Naomi Shihab Nye, Hala Alyan, Mohammed El Kurd, Carolina Ebeid, Noor Hindi, Refaat Alareer, Etel Adnan, Eileen Myles, and many more.
Bespoke maritime flags have been made by the artists Nicole Eisenman and Rosalind Nashashibi.
The Gaza Reader is illustrated with drawings from artists Aml El Nakhala, Hazem Harb, and Adel El Taweel.
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York
Thursday, April 18
7:30 pm
Join us next Thursday for the seventh installment of our ongoing film series at Anthology Film Archives where we will be screening two documentary-adjacent films about the Lebanese civil war, its aftermath, and its mediation. Borhane Alaouié’s Letter From a Time of Exile, though scripted, is shot like a documentary and often confused for one. While Akram Zaatari’s All is Well on the Border deftly deconstructs the genre of post-war resistance hagiography.
Borhane Alaouié Letter From a Time of Exile
1988, 52 min, 16mm-to-digital
Arabic and French with English subtitles
Scripted by Najwa Barakat and shot in a pseudo-documentary style, Letter From a Time of Exile presents the stories of four Lebanese men whose lives have taken unexpected turns due to the Civil War: Abdallah, a former militia member; Karim, an unemployed journalist living in Paris; Rizkallah, a car salesman in Brussels; and Nessim, a surgeon who has settled in Strasbourg. Narrated with subtle humor, Letter From a Time of Exile is both a portrait of people in exile, and the cities in which they currently reside.
Akram Zaatari All is Well on the Border
1997, 44 min, video
In Arabic with English subtitles
Focusing on the Israeli occupation of the South,_ All is Well_ is an early example of Zaatari’s explorations into postwar Lebanese memory culture through the collection of testimonies and documents. Working at Rafic Hariri’s Future TV at the time, Zaatari was particularly interested in the ways in which histories of resistance were mediated and exploited in their dissemination; Zaatari centers his own mediation by having genuine testimonies and letters from imprisoned fighters read by actors, revealing their teleprompters and script pages on screen. All is Well is an incisive meditation on the propagation of resistance stories.
$12 General Admission / $9 Seniors and Students
Tickets available at the box office or at the Anthology Film Archives website
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York
Thursday, March 28
7:30 pm
Join us Thursday for the sixth installment of our ongoing film series at Anthology Film Archives where we will be screening two documentaries from Omar Amiralay: A Plate of Sardines (1998), in which Amiralay and Mohammad Malas visit the ruins of the Golan village of Quneitra, destroyed by the Israeli army in 1974, its only remaining building a former cinema; and The Man With the Golden Soles (2000), where Amiralay wrestles with both self and subject in his precarious portrait of billionaire Lebanese statesman Rafic Hariri, five years before his assassination.
The films will be introduced by writer, editor, and film programmer Hicham Awad.
Omar Amiralay A Plate Of Sardines (or the First Time I Heard of Israel)
1998, 17 min, digital
Arabic and French with English subtitles
“The first time I heard of Israel, I was in Beirut, the conversation was about a plate of sardines. I was six years old, Israel was two.” In the company of filmmaker Mohammad Malas, Omar Amiralay revisits the ruins of the destroyed village of Quneitra.
Omar Amiralay The Man With the Golden Soles
2000, 54 min, digital
Arabic and English with English Subtitles
Amiralay’s portrait of billionaire Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri was by his own admission a failure: “What I feared would happen had indeed happened…Hariri was now in complete control.” His leftist peers had tried to warn him (“You know very well that power is pernicious”) but Amiralay nevertheless enters into a dialectical struggle with Hariri in a series of one-on-one interviews. Unable to circumvent his subject’s charisma, Amiralay’s adverserial intentions slowly give way to familiarity as Hariri—often referring to himself in the third person—increasingly appears to be directing from in front of the camera. Featuring Elias Khoury, Fawwaz Traboulsi, and Samir Kassir.
$12 General Admission / $9 Seniors and Students
Tickets available at the box office or at the Anthology Film Archives website
Saturday March 9, 6pm
264 Canal Street, 3W
New York, NY 10013
Please join us on Saturday, March 9th, for a reading by poet Kaveh Akbar, author of the acclaimed new novel Martyr!, followed by a discussion with critic Anahid Nersessian.
The painful absurdities and insoluble contradictions that attend the life of the immigrant provide the occasion for Akbar’s debut novel. Martyr! is the story of Cyrus Shams, a young man born in Iran and raised in Indiana by his father. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother was killed aboard Iran Air Flight 655, a passenger flight brought down by a pair of surface-to-air missiles fired by the USS Vincennes, an American Navy cruiser, on July 3rd, 1988. Cyrus, now an alcoholic in recovery, is desperate for his own life to matter. He becomes obsessed with the idea of martyrdom, constantly adding to a file on his computer called BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx…
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York
Thursday, February 22
7:30 pm
Join us Thursday for the fifth installment of our ongoing film series at Anthology Film Archives, where we will be screening The Man Who Watched Windows (1982), a rarely seen early work from Algerian director Merzak Allouache. A singular and underappreciated film, The Man Who Watched Windows is a tightly-calibrated portrait of a man who does not wish to understand the changing world around him.
Merzak Allouache The Man Who Watched Windows
1982, 85 min, 16mm
In Arabic with projected English subtitles.
Merzak Allouache’s third film, The Man Who Watched Windows is the story of Rachid, an austere bureaucrat who has just been transferred without warning from the National Archives to the cinema library. The constant motion of post-post-independence 1980s Algerian society displeases him, as does cinema; worse yet, books on cinema—the very idea of which disturbs him. Having dedicated his life to the state, Rachid is so agitated by his transfer that he is driven to paranoia and, ultimately, an act of violence. Print courtesy the CNC (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée).
$12 General Admission / $9 Seniors and Students Tickets available at the box office or at the Anthology Film Archives website
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York
Thursday, January 18
7:30 pm
Join us Thursday for the fourth installment of our ongoing film series at Anthology Film Archives, where we will be screening two artist-made documentaries about survival and resistance in occupied Palestine. Khaled Jarrar’s Infiltrators (2012) captures the myriad ways West Bank residents attempt to circumvent the so-called separation wall, while Jumana Manna’s Foragers (2022) examines Israel’s use of ecological legislation to further alienate Palestinians from their land, food, and culture.
Khaled Jarrar Infiltrators
2012, 70 min, digital
Artist Khaled Jarrar shadows West Bank residents as they search for ways to bypass the highly militarized Israeli apartheid wall that separates them from Jerusalem. Over, under, or through, with great difficulty and risk, the infiltrators are by turns people who wish to visit relatives in hospitals, religious women trying to reach Al Aqsa, teenage boys tasked with “smuggling” bread, and, most often, construction workers; Palestinian men whose labor will be used to build up the city they are not permitted to enter. Alternating between cigarette breaks, detours, waiting, climbing, escaping, and confrontation, Infiltrators depicts the constant struggle to both survive and resist captivity and occupation.
Jumana Manna Foragers
2022, 64 min, DCP
Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee, and Jerusalem, Foragers employs fiction, documentary, and archival footage to demonstrate the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on Palestinian foraging practices. The restrictions prohibit the collection of wild ’akkoub and za’atar, and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds of people, exclusively Arabs. While Israel insists the laws are necessary to protect native plants from extinction, for Palestinians they constitute an ecological veil for carceral legislation that alienates them from their land and culture. Though singular in its focus, Foragers illuminates the links between land, food, indigeneity, law, and the quotidian defiance necessitated by life under occupation.
Total running time: ca. 140 min.
$12 General Admission / $9 Seniors and Students Tickets available at the box office or at the Anthology Film Archives website
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York
Thursday, October 26
7:30 pm
Join us Thursday for the third installment of our recurring film series at Anthology Film Archives, where we will be screening two documentaries about Cairo and its denizens: Youssef Chahine’s wry love letter to his adopted city, Cairo, as Told by Youssef Chahine (1991), and the US premiere of a new restoration of Jocelyne Saab’s Egypt, City of the Dead (1977).
The screening will be followed by a discussion with journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous and writer Hussein Omar, both of whom have family buried in the City of the Dead.
Youssef Chahine Cairo, as Told by Youssef Chahine
Egypt, 1991, 23 min, 35mm
In Arabic with English subtitles
Commissioned by French television to make a documentary about Cairo, iconic Egyptian director Youssef Chahine chose to mix observational footage with scripted vignettes to produce a mischievously meta film, marked by his characteristic humor, eroticism, and incisiveness. Despite its brevity, Cairo sensitively captures the dusty, chaotic beauty of city life, setting its numerous injustices—poverty, overcrowded living quarters, greedy real estate developers, and the violence of globalization—against the backdrop of the first Gulf War. Refusing the mock-objectivity of reportage, Chahine presents a portrait of the city through his love for its inhabitants.
Jocelyne Saab Egypt, City of the Dead
Lebanon, 1977, 38 min, 16mm-to-digital
In Arabic and French with English subtitles
In recent years, the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has begun to raze large swaths of Cairo’s historic necropolis, a sprawling series of cemeteries where hundreds of thousands of the city’s poorest have taken up residence, squatting inside and around the centuries-old mausoleums, in an emphatic confluence of poverty and death. The destruction of the area, known as the City of the Dead, is both a mass eviction and the latest in Sisi’s assault on Egyptian life in the service of rapid development. Jocelyne Saab’s 1977 film documents the community living inside the necropolis alongside other members of Cairo’s toiling classes. Featuring music from Sheikh Imam and commentary from other leftists, including Lutfi el-Kholi, the screenwriter of Chahine’s The Sparrow (1972). US premiere of 2k restoration completed in 2023 in France and Lebanon by the Jocelyne Saab Association.
$12 General Admission / $9 Seniors and Students Tickets available at the box office or at the Anthology Film Archives website
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York
Thursday, August 3
7:30 pm
Join us for the second installment of our recurring film series at Anthology Film Archives, where we will be hosting a screening of French-Tunisian filmmaker Nadia El-Fani’s low-budget hacker drama, Bedwin Hacker (2003).
In this campy millennium cyber-thriller, culture-jamming hacker Kalt, AKA “Bedwin Hacker,” hijacks European television stations from her Tunisian mountain hideout. With the help of her motley crew of freedom-loving poets, queers, and musicians, she broadcasts cryptic political messages delivered by a cartoon camel. Meanwhile, a French intelligence agent named Julia relentlessly pursues the elusive pirate, with whom she shares multiple romantic entanglements, past and present…
$12 General Admission / $9 Seniors and Students Tickets available at the box office or at the Anthology Film Archives website
B7L9 Art Station
Bhar Lazreg
La Marsa, Tunisia
June 22, 6:30 PM
On the occasion of Meriem Bennani’s exhibition Life on the CAPS, to open this week at Tunis’s BL79 Art Station / Kamel Lazaar Foundation, we will be launching a publication of the same name.
The book is the artist’s first comprehensive monograph and includes essays by writers Emily LaBarge and Elvia Wilk, alongside conversations with Omar Berrada, Fatima Al Qadiri, Amal Benzekri, Aziz Bouyabrine, and Bidoun.
The opening and book launch will be followed by a conversation between Meriem Bennani, Negar Azimi, Tiffany Malakooti, and Myriam Ben Salah.
Life on the CAPS, the book, is co-edited by Bidoun’s Negar Azimi and Tiffany Malakooti, and published by The Renaissance Society and Bidoun.
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York
Thursday, June 15, 2023
7 pm
Join us for the first in an ongoing series of Bidoun-curated screenings at Anthology Film Archives that privilege rare and/or underappreciated films. For the inaugural installment, we’ll be presenting the cult favorite documentary Four Women of Egypt from Egyptian-Canadian director Tahani Rached. Her film will be preceded by The Singing Sheikh, a short by Lebanese director Heiny Srour on the iconic dissident Egyptian folk musician, Sheikh Imam.
The screening will include:
Tahani Rached Four Women of Egypt
1997, 89 min, digital
In Arabic and French with English subtitles
A portrait of four friends in Cairo (Wedad Mitry, Safinaz Kazem, Shahenda Maklad, and Amina Rachid), all born under colonial occupation, and all former political prisoners under Sadat. Despite ideological differences, the women maintain their friendships – sustained by their humor, warmth, commitment to politics, and shared ideals of social justice. Four Women of Egypt is a testament to both friendships and politics that have endured the violence and disappointments of 20th-century Egypt.
preceded by:
Heiny Srour The Singing Sheikh
1991, 11 min, digital
In Arabic with English subtitles
A rarely-seen documentary on Sheikh Imam, the legendary and frequently imprisoned Egyptian folk musician whose political songs fearlessly indicted the ruling classes.
Total running time: ca. 105 min
$12 General Admission / $9 Seniors and Students
Tickets available at the box office or at the Anthology Film Archives website
Still from Here & Elsewhere (1976). Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin & Anne-Marie Miéville
Godard, Miéville, Hatoum, and Yaqubi at Anthology Film Archives
New York
February 23, 2023
7:30 PM
Artists Against Apartheid, Bidoun, and Shasha Movies present Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Marie Miéville’s Here and Elsewhere (1976), alongside Mohanad Yaqubi’s Off Frame (2016) and Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988).
It has been 45 years since Godard and Miéville made Here and Elsewhere, a filmic essay that has exercised a talismanic power over generations of artists and audiences with its stark, self-critical meditation on cinema’s limitations in representing faraway realities, in this case, the ongoing Palestinian resistance movement of the 1970s.
Screened alongside, Mona Hatoum’s elegiac and epistolary Measures of Distance (1988) and Mohanad Yaqubi’s Off Frame (2016) provide a Palestinian counterpoint, as filmmakers of different generations offer up inspired explorations of word, image, and narrative.
Nicolas Moufarrege
Mutant International
CCA Berlin
February 9 - March 19, 2023
Bidoun and CCA Berlin are pleased to announce Mutant International, an exhibition featuring a selection of works by Egyptian-born Lebanese artist Nicolas Moufarrege (1947-1985) – his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.
A prodigious visual artist, writer, and curator, Moufarrege made wry, sophisticated, and exuberant work over a ten-year career that spanned Beirut, Paris, and New York. His practice rethought the Western art canon and Levantine weaving traditions through irreverent engagements with painting and sewing, graffiti and collage, Pop and the esoteric. Having launched himself in Beirut in the 1970s, Moufarrege left shortly after the calamitous beginnings of the long civil wars and moved to Paris, where he started producing large, tapestry-adjacent works. He arrived in New York’s East Village in 1981, just as an art scene was coming together amid a handful of crumbling tenements. In that city, he curated unusual, much-talked-about exhibitions, penned high-stakes essays and manifestos, and showed his own unclassifiable artworks. New York is also where he died of AIDS-related complications at the age of 37.
Moufarrege’s sui generis, shape-shifting work remains largely absent from the annals of art history — missing in Lebanon, as well, despite all the illustrious efforts of the last 15 years to make sense of art from the broader Arabic-speaking region. But it is missing, too, from most retrospective looks at American painting in the 1980s or The Pictures Generation. As for the East Village scene which he was so intimately tied to, he has tended to appear as a footnote, a curiosity with a foreign-sounding name.
The concise selection of works — tapestries, embroidered paintings, and drawings — as well as archival documents and ephemera on view as part of Nicolas Moufarrege: Mutant International draws a rich trajectory of artmaking informed by diasporic yearning and queer jouissance, and shaped through a delirious hodgepodge of references spanning Islamic calligraphy, superhero comics, cultures of advertising, and gay erotica.
While Moufarrege’s name all but disappeared following his too-early death, Bidoun and CCA Berlin are committed to bringing attention to his largely unknown body of work, while also using it as a springboard for a broader discussion about art and erasure, queer aesthetics in 20th-century art, and the cultural legacies of the AIDS epidemic.
On March 12, a public symposium organized by Bidoun featuring contributions by Nick Mauss, Michael C. Vazquez, Xandro Segade, and others will offer multiple lenses through which to view Moufarrege’s idiosyncratic oeuvre, in part by speaking to and about the cities in which he lived and worked — storied cosmopolitan enclaves, from 1950s Alexandria to 1960s Beirut, 1970s Paris to 1980s New York.
The works on view as part of Nicolas Moufarrege: Mutant International were selected by Negar Azimi (Bidoun) and Edwin Nasr (Associate Curator CCA Berlin). The exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Mohammed Fakhro, Raghida Ghandour, Ranya Husami Ghandour, Maria Sukkar, Tony Tamer, and Sultan Al Qassemi. Special thanks to Nabil and Hanan Moufarrege, as well as Dean Daderko.
Ashurbanipal Babilla, Untitled, 1976. Mixed Media on paper. Courtesy Laal Collection
Organized by Negar Azimi and Sohrab Mohebbi
Carnegie Museum of Art
September 24 - April 2, 2023
Pittsburgh, PA
Over the past five decades, the artist Fereydoun Ave has assembled a singular collection of modern and contemporary Iranian art inflected by personal history, friendship, sensibility, and circumstance.
On returning to Iran in 1970 after years of education abroad, Ave worked as a curator and designer at Tehran’s Iran-America Society Cultural Center, where he organized groundbreaking exhibitions of Iranian and international artists. Around the same time, he began collecting art with money borrowed from his grandmother. Ave continued to collect over the years, while he moved on to positions at consequential Tehran arts institutions, including the avant-garde Kargah-e Namayesh (Theater Workshop), where he worked as a resident designer, and the Zand Gallery, where he served as Artistic Director.
After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Ave stayed behind as his compatriots left the country in droves. In the early 1980s he launched 13 Vanak, an independent art space for Iranian artists in a disused garden shed in an iconic Tehran square. The nimble and irreverent exhibitions at 13 Vanak attracted diverse audiences, including, on occasion, befuddled agents of the state. Though 13 Vanak closed in 2009, Ave has continued to mentor successive generations of artists both in and outside Iran.
The relationship between art and life, like history, is messy, impossible to tame. Ave, who is an accomplished artist himself, serves as both subject and cipher of this presentation, a vantage onto the fascinating—and contested—cultural history of 20th- and 21st-century Iran.
The Laal Collection presentation is curated by Bidoun’s Negar Azimi and Sohrab Mohebbi, Bidoun Contributing Editor and the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator of the 58th Carnegie International.
The 58th Carnegie International is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art from September 24, 2022 through April 2, 2023.
A comprehensive book on Fereydoun Ave, edited by Negar Azimi, Aria Kasaei, and Sohrab Mohebbi, is in progress.
Negar Azimi and Sohrab Mohebbi would like to thank those who helped make this presentation possible: Aria Kasaei, Ali Bakhtiari, Rochanak Etemad, Omid Bonakdar, Shaqayeq Arabi, Hormoz Hematian, Alireza Fatehi, Balice Hertling Gallery, Dastan Gallery, Farhad Moshiri, Sohrab Mahdavi, and Roya Khadjavi-Heidari.
Square Diner
33 Leonard Street
New York
Thursday, May 19
6:30 PM
Bidoun & The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture Present:
The Ornette Effect: Coleman Biographer Maria Golia in conversation with Sukhdev Sandhu and Michael C. Vazquez.
Introduced by Negar Azimi
Maria Golia, a long-time friend of Bidoun, will read an excerpt from her biography of the great American saxophonist and free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman (Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure, Reaktion Books). To be followed by a discussion on and around tomb-raiding, photography, and objects that fall from the sky.
About Maria Golia: Author of sundry nonfictions, Golia was born in New Jersey prior to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Marylyn Monroe’s suicide, and the first lunar landing, Former student of neurophysiology, Texas nightclub manager, and tutor of Islamic art and architecture to Kuwaiti royalty. Fellow of the London Institute of Ecotechnics and non-driver. Lifetime interest in the quandaries of a discontinuous reality, singularities, and the exploration of urban and inner space. Residing in Egypt since 1992.
François Ghebaly
391 Grand Street
New York
Sunday, November 14, 2021
2-4 Pm
François Ghebaly, Bidoun, and After 8 Books invite you to the New York launch of Neïl Beloufa’sPeople Love War Data & Travels at François Ghebaly NY on Sunday, November 14th from 2 to 4 pm.
Neïl Beloufa’s first book-length monograph culls the artist’s zigzag work from 2007 to the present. Beloufa’s commitment to making visible the conditions of his art-making is well-known and this book is no exception; it is as generous, transparent, experimental and chaotic as he is.
With readings by Ruba Katrib, Negar Azimi, and a conversation between the artist and Myriam Ben Salah.
