BIDOUN
Issue 18: INTERVIEWS now in stores
Perfect for the beach, the café, and the Quonset hut—Bidoun presents: INTERVIEWS. Seventeen* conversations, sometimes whimsical, sometimes heated, from the unquiet heart of Middle East and points all over, featuring pop stars, used bookstore owners, billboard painters, grey eminences, enfants terrible, and nerds.
Where we had arrived after the 60s—imagine you are eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and all this new technology is developing. Color television in your home. And what is the first thing you see in color? The napalm bomb. —TONY SHAFRAZI
Spend time with Ghida Fakhry, coanchor of Al Jazeera English’s Washington bureau; or Banu Cennetoğlu, currently representing Turkey at the Venice Biennale with what might be the world’s largest artist’s book; Alejandro Jodorowsky, the psychomagician of everyday life; or the geeky gang of four behind Samandal, the Middle East’s first trilingual comics anthology, as they talk shop about giant robots, graphic novels, and the Arab art world.
“Being Lebanese is overrated.” —HATEM IMAM, Samandal
Meanwhile, Lawrence Weiner explains the difference between subwaying and Stuttgarting; Hampton Fancher helps others help himself; and Maya Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., tells tall tales from her Tamil childhood in Sri Lanka and her coming of age in the UK.
“When I got to London I automatically thought I was black. For some reason I felt the beats more. Hip hop came out and everything else just looked really silly and stupid and pathetic.” —M.I.A.
But wait—there’s so much more. We staged encounters between Johan Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy; between Etel Adnan and Lynne Tillman; Sean Gullette and Mohammed Mrabet; and the whole Bidoun team and Tony Shafrazi, who reveals how the graffitist who defaced the Guernica to bring it to life became the go-go gallerist of the 1980s art scene. Plus Egyptian literary lion Sonallah Ibrahim, Iraqi architect extraordinaire Mohamed Makyia, Bombay art group CAMP, and John Wilcock, the other founder of Interview magazine.
“The Egyptians say the universe is the excrement of God, and we are the larva in that excrement. But it depends on how you look at it.” —ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY
*Visit Bidoun online for five more web-only conversations, featuring artist Michael Stevenson, writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, actor Alexander Siddig, and Emirati legend Zaki Nusseibeh.
Bidoun 18 • INTERVIEWS • 192 pages • www.bidoun.com
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