Since 2004, Bidoun has served as a platform for new questions, images, and ideas about the Middle East. Bidoun’s activities fall in three primary areas: publishing, educational, and curatorial. To date, the organization’s projects have included a range of pursuits: curatorial initiatives, educational programs, artist commissions, talks, tours, performances, books, an itinerant library, and an online archive of avant-garde media. Bidoun engages audiences in a nuanced and historically-informed consideration of the Middle East’s contemporary art scene.
Bidoun Projects
Screenshot of the Bidoun.org homepage, 2020. Courtesy Bidoun
Screenshot of General Behavior, Artist Project by Farah AL Qasimi, Text by Sophia AL-Maria, published on Bidoun.org, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Bidoun
Installation view of the exhibition Reza Abdoh, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2019. Courtesy Adam Soch and the Estate of Reza Abdoh. Photo: Frank Sperling
Spread from the Reza Abdoh monograph, published by Hatje Cantz, 2020. Courtesy Bidoun
Spread from the Reza Abdoh monograph, published by Hatje Cantz, 2020. Courtesy Bidoun
Spread from the Reza Abdoh monograph, published by Hatje Cantz, 2020. Courtesy Bidoun
“The terrific range of project proposals we receive each year speaks to the mobile and porous disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art practice, and to the rich and inventive ways writers approach art today. They are alert to the urgent need to expand the conventions of art history and criticism with ideas from other discourses, such as black studies, transnational and diaspora studies, gender and women’s studies, and LGBT studies. The work of lesser known and overlooked artists and art communities continues to be mined, with writers articulating new ways to counter the striking imbalances of race, class and gender that continue to affect the arts and the culture industry.”