Issue #15 out now
READ the shocking true story of the Pakistani gourmet ice cream mogul who ploughed his profits into horror films!
SPEND an evening in the Georgian lair of the Iron Sheik!
SPECTATE as The Toughest Man in Cairo battles The Zionist Vegetable!
MARVEL at a cavalcade of Orientalist beach readings, tabloid illnesses, world-historic hoaxes, fantastic voyages, typographical utopias, and lustful Turks!
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Bidoun 15, on newsstands now, treats the theme of PULP—the kingdom of the obvious and exaggerated, the sensational and the predictable, peopled by detectives, werewolves, and robot girls. In pulp love comes in two flavors: saccharine sweet and raunchy porn. Pulp is worth exactly the paper it’s printed on—the cheapest paper in the world. Pulp means paper; or rather, the mulch from which paper is made. And it is this relationship to the physical that is the key to pulp, as genre and as critique. Pulp can be a painting, but not art. A book, but not literature. A movie—but not cinema.In her project Untitled Polaroids, Haris Epaminonda turns her camera on her private library, photographing photographs from the pages of books; the result is a series of images that reads like a gauzy travelogue of a trip to a vintage encyclopedia. A similar journey is evident in the works of Babak Radboy, whose textual still lives are scattered throughout this issue—spoils of his recent excavation of Beirut bookstores, informed by his complete ignorance of Arabic and keen eye for conspiracy. Ahmet Ögüt presents a photo-series celebrating a neglected form of national poetry—the rhymes and sayings Turkish truckers splash across the backs of their rigs.
In the film section, Gary Dauphin considers Catherine Deneuve’s unlikely road trip to war-torn South Lebanon in Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s “Je Veux Voir,” Sukhdev Sandhu delights in the animated wonders of “Waltz With Bashir,” and Rasha Salti sits down with Syrian auteur Omar Amiralay.
In the arts, Jennifer Allen profiles Nairy Baghramian, Clare Davies sits down with Shady El Noshokaty’s latest project, Ashkan Sepahvand traces Natascha Sadr-Haghighian’s latest rumination on the art market, and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie casts an eye to Rania Stephan’s current video-in-progress on the disappearance of Egyptian star Souad Hosni. And we have our usual installment of columns on travel, museums, and curatorial practice. Exhibition reviews include: A Principle of Assumptions/Rodeo Gallery, Art Now in Lebanon/Amman, Ali Chitsaz, Ayman Ramadan, I Dream of the Stans/Winkleman Gallery, Tala Madani, The Anxious/Five Artists Under the Pressure of War, Jeffar Khaldi, Mitra Tabrizian, Anna Boghiguian, Home Works IV Beirut, Nadim Asfar, and The New Normal/Artist’s Space.
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