Bidoun
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Since 2004, Bidoun has filled a gaping hole in the arts and culture coverage of the Middle East, pioneering a distinctive voice that is intelligent, critical, and original. From the beginning, 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, our 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 magazine has won some of the most sought-after honors in the publishing world, including a nomination for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2009, and three UTNE Independent Press Awards for social and cultural coverage, design, and art writing. Bidoun has been written about in Artforum, British Vogue, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and made an appearance on Topic A With Tina Brown, among many other venues.
Our contributors include avant-garde artists, gallerists, writers, activists, and entrepreneurs from across the globe, as well as pop stars (like Maya Arulpragasam aka MIA), art stars (like Walid Raad, Lawrence Weiner, and Tony Shafrazi), and even a Nobel Prize laureate (Orhan Pamuk). Source
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| Scope | International |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Country | United States of America |
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Recent Articles
Search ArticlesBidoun Mix 6: Asma Maroof
Courtesy Asma Maroof For Asma Maroof, sometimes known as Asmara, collaboration is alpha and omega. The musician has worked with such Bidounish artists as Fatima Al Qadiri, Sophia Al-Maria, and MIA (RIP), along with a slew of others, including Kelela, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Trajal Harrell. Her output spans contemporary art, film, theater, fashion, and club culture; you almost certainly know her by her work, if not her name.
The Rise and Fall of Arab Berlin
Courtesy @berlinisover We started hearing about the cancellations within days. It was October 2023, and artists, writers, and culture workers were losing sales, residencies, fees, and even jobs for expressing solidarity with the cause of Palestinian liberation. In the ensuing months, it became clear that an especially large number of these cancellations were happening in Berlin, a city that has served as a haven for the counterculturally inclined since the 1980s.
The True Things
To those on the outside, Iran can seem impenetrable even at the best of times. Few foreign journalists are allowed to work there, visas are hard to come by, and writing by Iranians doesn’t easily make its way into the mainstream media. This sense of remoteness has only grown since the onset of the military operation the US calls Epic Fury and Israel calls Lion’s Roar.
Ana ❤️ Niyū Yūrk
Mahka Eslami, Untitled, 2023-2024. From Bodega Boys (Revers editions, 2025). Courtesy the artist She was to stand, robed and gigantic, her torch at once a succor for incoming ships and a beacon to the world. Her sculptor, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, was drawn to monumental forms. As a young man he had travelled up the Nile and photographed the stone colossi built to guard a pharaoh’s tomb.
A Time of Terror
A pellet shot at protesters by Iranian security forces. Image courtesy the author Editors’ Note In the fall of 2022, as protests instigated by the killing of a young woman for the crime of improper hijab engulfed Iran, we asked one woman to keep a record of the events — the tempo and texture of the uprising, her own hopes and fears. That movement, dubbed “Woman, Life, Freedom,” captured the attention of the world.
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A Protest Against Spaghetti is an opportunity to feature shorter, timelier, more casual content: interviews, as-told-to’s, diaries, recommendations, pictures, moving pictures, mix tapes, listings of Bidounish happenings across the globe, & much else.
House Arab
I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it sparkled on their tongues. I still wasn’t a doctor or engineer, but the publication cast a flattering light on them, revealing them to be open minded enough to let me pursue a non-traditional field, yet strict enough to propel me to its most rarefied strata.
At the Border of the Night
I met Naguib Mahfouz for the first and only time at a secret location in Cairo. This was after October 15, 1994, the day he was attacked in one of the alleyways he frequented on his daily walk, by a stranger who stabbed him repeatedly in the neck.
Hot, Horny, Exalted, Free
On December 12, 2024, the Lebanese artist Myriam Boulos (b. 1992) posted a photo of an AK-47 on her Instagram. The gun sits upright and slantwise in a floral-patterned armchair. Aside from the dark brown and black tones of the rifle and its army green strap, the picture is a study in ivory, from the painted walls and tiled floor to the plastic bag and paper coffee cups resting at the foot of the armchair to the small, rumpled book perched on one arm.
Outliving the Wolves
Heiny Srour doesn’t suffer fools gladly. “I try to avoid flattering the baser instincts of the public,” the 80-year-old Lebanese filmmaker tells me. It is a chilly early-summer afternoon in 2023, and we are sitting on a park bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, the city she has called home since 2002. I had come here because I wanted to write a literary portrait of Srour, an obscure yet legendary figure in cinema circles.