The New Museum has collaborated with the magazine Bidoun: Arts and Culture From the Middle East which has organized an exhibition for the Museum as Hub. The Bidoun Library Project at the New Museum is a highly partial account of five decades of printed matter in, near, about, and around the Middl... Read more
The New Museum has collaborated with the magazine Bidoun: Arts and Culture From the Middle East which has organized an exhibition for the Museum as Hub. The Bidoun Library Project at the New Museum is a highly partial account of five decades of printed matter in, near, about, and around the Middle East. Arrayed along numerous book shelves are over 700 publications ranging from pulp fictions and propaganda, monographs and guidebooks, and pamphlets and periodicals, on subjects like the oil boom to the Dubai bust, the Cold War to the hot pant, Pan-Arabs to Black Muslims, revolutionaries to royals, and Orientalism to its opposites.
For its North American debut, the Bidoun Library focuses on the twentieth century: more specifically, the period after the Second World War, set against the context of the Cold War, when the Middle East as we know it came into its own. It was the heyday of the printed page, perhaps the last period in which the predominant forms of the written word were the book, the newspaper, and the periodical magazine. Looking back, the printed matter of the last century appears increasingly opaque as it recedes further and further from active circulation. A library, then, is entropy.
