Summary: Negar Azimi is Senior editor of Bidoun Magazine. She is a member of the Beirut-based Fondation Arabe pour l'Image, with whom she is working on photographic projects in Iran and the greater Arab region. She studied politics at Stanford and Harvard, and is now pursuing her PhD at Columbia University.
Negar Azimi will present the Bidoun Library, an itinerant long-term exhibition project curated by the editorial team of Bidoun Magazine. The library was launched in Abu Dhabi and has since been to Dubai, Beirut, and most recently, the New Museum in New York City. At the New Museum, the library took on a new life, presenting a highly partial account of five decades of printed matter in, near, about, and around the Middle East. Bidoun has compiled diverse publications ranging from pulp fictions and propaganda, monographs and guidebooks, and pamphlets and periodicals, on subjects like the oil boom to the Dubai bust, the Cold War to the hot pant, Pan-Arabs to Black Muslims, revolutionaries to royals, and Orientalism to its opposites. This talk will briefly present the New Museum version of the library as well as its current incarnation in Cairo, while more broadly, exploring the many ways in which we have come to know the "The Middle East" in the 20th century through printed matter.
http://www.bidoun.org/ 