NEGAR AZIMI & Lisa Farjam, babak radboy et al:. BIDOUN ISSUE 22 Fall 2010 : LIBRARY. New York, 2010. 4to in original magazine wraps. Around 180 pages. Some minor wavyness to pages and light wear to cover, mainly lower spine but solid and clean and complete

BIDOUN: Arts and Culture from the Middle East

Editor Babak R.: (…)” the cover: a matte off-white surface with a photograph glued to its center. It might be black-and-white or colorful, pristine or blurred or torn along the edges. It might depict a portrait or an action, a business meeting or a wedding, maybe an accident. We have no idea, actually: we’ve never seen most of them, and probably never will. A friend of the magazine in Cairo purchased five thousand photos from flea-markets in Cairo and sent the lot of them directly to our printer, who glued them onto the cover and sent them out into the world, eliminating the middleman: us. This gesture — plundering one set of incidental archives to create another — seemed an appropriate way to herald the latest issue of Bidoun, which considers that ever-expanding entropy, the library. Building on Bidoun Projects’ recent exhibition at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York, we present a reading of five decades of printed matter, carefully selected with no regard for taste or quality, in an attempt to document every possible way that people have depicted and defined — slandered, celebrated, obfuscated, hyperbolized, ventriloquized, photographed, surveyed, and/or exhumed — that vast, vexed, nefarious construct known as “the Middle East.” The result is banal and offensive, a parade of stereotypes, caricatures, and misunderstandings of a sort that rarely makes it into the magazine, all the trappings of the Middle East as fetish: veils, oil, fashion victims; sexy sheikhs, sex with sheikhs, Sufis, stonings; calligraphy, the caliphate, terrorism; Israel”