Since 2004, Bidoun has filled a gaping hole in the arts and culture coverage of the Middle East and its diasporas, pioneering a distinctive voice that is intelligent, irreverent, and original. From the beginning, Bidoun has served as a platform—for new questions, images, and ideas about the region.
Bidoun’s activities fall in three primary areas: publishing, educational, and curatorial. To date, our projects have included a range of pursuits: curatorial initiatives, writing workshops, 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, The New Yorker, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and elsewhere.
Our contributors include artists and writers from across the globe, among them pop stars (Maya Arulpragasam aka MIA), art stars (Walid Raad, Lawrence Weiner), and at least one Nobel Prize laureate (Orhan Pamuk).