Exhibition | Bidoun Library
12 Oct - 17 Nov., 2010. 7 PM | First Floor
The Bidoun Library Project represents a partial collection of books, exhibition catalogues, artists' books, and ephemera drawn from five decades of printed matter in, near, about, and around the Middle East. The 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.
The motif of the exhibition is the object of the book—the book as object of material production, and the book as a vector for material objectives. Both notions were at play in the publishing projects of the Cold War, when the First and Second World Wars contested at the level of word and image. The Russian International News Agency produced Central Asian photo books; so did the US State Department. The politico cultural magazine Tricontinental, produced in Havana by the Organization of Solidarity of the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and disseminated on university campuses across the Third World, mirrored the magazine Transition, produced in Africa, edited by an Indian, and funded by the CIA.
As part of the Cairo iteration of the Library, copies of Bidoun Magazine’s fall issue, “Library,” will be on hand. “Library” serves as a catalogue of sorts to an exhibition Bidoun staged at the New Museum in New York City in 2010. That exhibition especially focused on the myriad ways in which people have depicted and defined what has come to be known as “the Middle East”; the books that hang from the ceiling here—Home Theater, Natural Order, Margin of Error, and Further Reading—represent a series of readings of the books and magazines in that version of the library. Affixed to the cover of each copy of Bidoun is a unique photograph procured for one Egyptian pound from the Cairo-based collector Amgad Naguib.
Since 2008, the Bidoun Library has been exhibiting source materials and artist projects that pertain to, grow out of, or extend the work of the quarterly magazine Bidoun: Arts and Culture From the Middle East. Like the magazine—the Bidoun Library is at once a space, an archive, and a network of collaborators. Since its inaugural installation in Abu Dhabi in 2008, the Bidoun Library has partnered with an array of international art institutions and collectives, including the Lebanese comics journal Samandal and the Turkish artist’s book publisher Bent, as well as Art Dubai, Ashkal Alwan: The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, and 98weeks Project Space in Beirut. Its final stop before Cairo was the New Museum in New York City under the rubric of the Museum as Hub project.
Importantly, the project allows visitors to explore, research, and create wide-ranging connections through materials that are generally unavailable commercially. Parts of the Library focuses on materials created by and for artists. Equally, the Library showcases artists’ books generously donated by JRP Ringier (Zurich) and Walther Konig (Berlin) that will in turn stay on in Cairo—to be housed at the Townhouse Gallery’s own permanent library space.
In the end, what the Bidoun Library has evolved into is less a collection of books arranged according to an organizing principle than an organizing principle that collects and arranges books.
For more information visit: www.Bidoun.org
Townhouse Gallery of contemporary art
10 Nabrawy Street off Champollion Street, Downtown - Cairo
Tel: +20 2 2576 8086
info@thetownhousegallery.com
www.thetownhousegallery.com
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