Reading and launch in Venice next week @ytobarrada ‘s French Pavilion — join us !!!
My Center is Not in the Solar System is a sweeping and tender collection of essays on the life and work of the late Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan, whose art bore witness to so many of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ epochal shifts.
The book gathers reflections from friends, collaborators, and admirers, alongside a rare selection of Etel’s drawings.
With writings by Aria Aber, Omar Berrada, Gavin Bryars, Stuart Comer, Dominique Eddé, Fouad Elkoury, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Bruce Hainley, Isabella Hammad, Lamia Joreige, Abdellatif Laabi, Emily LaBarge, Quinn Latimer, Eileen Myles, Edwin Nasr, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ariana Reines, Lynne Tillman, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Anne Waldman, Robert Wilson, and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie.
Thank you @myriambensalah
Out now in our substack, Zain Khalid on the Post’s love-hate relationship with Mayor Mamdani (link in bio): The New York Post arrives in the morning like a brick through your window. It does not pretend to be above ideology. Its newsroom consists of eccentric conservatives, outer-borough uncles, Staten Island monarchists, Midtown libertarians, and the occasional tabloid surrealist who seems to have wandered in from the 80s. The Post is biased the way a cartoon is biased: the headline is the argument; the argument is the punchline; and the punchline is — occasionally, disconcertingly — perfect. Especially when its target is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who celebrates his 100th day in office today…
ARTISTS’ BLOCK: the rise and fall of Arab Berlin
A conversation between Marwa Arsanios, Tirdad Zolghadr, Jumana Manna, and Natascha Sadr-Haghighian
LINK IN BIO AND BIDOUN.ORG TO READ
We started hearing about the cancellations within days. It was October 2023, and artists, writers, and culture workers were losing sales, residencies, fees, and even jobs for expressing solidarity with the cause of Palestinian liberation. In the ensuing months, it became clear that an especially large number of these cancellations were happening in Berlin, a city that has served as a haven for the counter-culturally inclined since the 1980s.
We reached out to four figures, artists and writers of varying ages and nationalities whose names will be familiar to longtime readers of Bidoun: Marwa Arsanios, Jumana Manna, Natascha Sadr-Haghighian, and Tirdad Zolghadr. Each of them lived in Berlin in the 2010s and experienced firsthand the sense of excited possibility around an Arab city in the heart of Europe — and the collapse of that illusion of inclusivity. Each brings to the conversation their own distinct relationship to Berlin and its histories of activism, collaboration, and dissent.
Images courtesy of @berlinisover
NEW at bidoun.org. A conversation with historian Naghmeh Sohrabi
To those on the outside, Iran can seem impenetrable even at the best of times. Few foreign journalists are allowed to work there, visas are hard to come by, and writing by Iranians doesn’t easily make its way into the mainstream media. This sense of remoteness has only grown since the onset of the military operation the US calls Epic Fury and Israel calls Lion’s Roar. Three weeks in, this criminal war of choice has killed thousands, unleashed billows of toxic smoke, and flattened millennia-old heritage sites, even as new fronts open in Lebanon and the Gulf states. That the Iranian government has restricted both internet and telephone has only compounded Iran’s seeming isolation.
Amid this information blackout, Naghmeh Sohrabi’s Substack, These Are the True Things, has been at once a balm and an indispensable resource. A historian at Brandeis University, Sohrabi has been sourcing and translating texts published inside wartime Iran — in local newspapers, online platforms, and Telegram channels — and offering thoughtful contextual introductions. Posts have treated philosophical and political debates, diaries of Iran under the bombs, accounts from oil workers, and even black humor. Some of Sohrabi’s posts feature her own autobiographical reflections — she was born in Iran and spent her teenage years there at the height of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. The “true things” she relates create a vivid portrait of what it is like to be alive right now, inside Iran and out: worrying about friends and family, struggling to make sense of developments, practicing politics, and even, despite everything, finding shoots of hope in the unfolding events.
Photos by Anonymous
Ana ❤️ Niyū Yūrk:
A Conversation with Hiba Abid and Asad Dandia
By Yasmine Seale and Michael C. Vazquez
The story of Lady Liberty’s early life as an Egyptian is one I learned only recently, on a walking tour of Lower Manhattan. Focused on a couple blocks of the Financial District, the tour of what was once known as “Little Syria” offered a counter-history that placed a community usually banished to the margins at the heart of American life. Besides the crypto-Egyptian statue, we learned that the first peace treaty signed by the United States was written in Arabic; that both the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts descend from an infamous Muslim pirate; and that among the habitués of the Dunkin’ Donuts at 19 Rector Street are those who believe that its grounds remain blessed on account of the makeshift mosque, established by an Ottoman consul, that once stood at that address.
For Ana ❤️ Niyū Yūrk, Bidoun Senior Editor Michael C. Vazquez sits down with curator Hiba Abid and ambulatory historian Asad Dandia to explore the cornucopia of MENA-Americana that is Niyū Yūrk: Middle Eastern and North African Lives in the City, an exhibition at New York Public Library, through March 8.
Conceived and introduced by Yasmine Seale.
Bodega Boys images courtesy of @mahkaeslami
Link in BIO
***
Editors’ Note
In the fall of 2022, as protests instigated by the killing of a young woman for the crime of improper hijab engulfed Iran, we asked one woman to keep a record of the events — the tempo and texture of the uprising, her own hopes and fears. That movement, dubbed “Woman, Life, Freedom,” captured the attention of the world. For a moment, it felt like the Islamic Republic of Iran might be on the precipice of historic change.
The euphoria was short-lived. Like earlier uprisings in 2019, 2009, and 1999, Woman, Life, Freedom was crushed by the government. Tens of thousands were arrested, and scores were executed for demanding a better life. Among many of our friends in Iran, a sort of low-level depression set in.
In the final days of 2025, protests erupted all over again, impelled by miserable economic conditions that have made even the most basic pursuits next to impossible. When the government cracked down some ten days later, it conducted its killing in the dark, shutting down cell towers and the internet, plunging this country of over 90 million into silence.
We asked the same diarist, a resident of Tehran, to walk us through her experience of these past weeks. We publish her words with the knowledge that this moment is ongoing, the story far from over. This text has been translated from Farsi.
In solidarity, Bidoun
LINK IN BIO
THE YEAR IN BIDOUNICA … subscribe to our (free) substack (link in bio) and peruse favorites by @ztkhalid@yasmine.rashidi@performingseale@prettiestmetals@elizabeth.wiet@colloquium_unpopular_culture@negoush and Sohrab Mohebbi
From Zain Khalid’s introduction:
IN THE BIDOUNIVERSE, 2025 will be remembered as the year of Zohran Mamdani, whose victory united multiple ecologies—from community centers in Queens, to immigrants’ kitchens, to college campuses, and the city streets —into a viable municipal vision. If he is the apotheosis of the Bidouni—and he is—it’s because he wears his contradictions plainly: a socialist who knocks on front doors to fundraise, a friendly New Yorker who chats with strangers on the subway and smiles so much I have grown concerned about his jaw. He says nothing untoward, his politics are legible, his backstory exquisitely scrambled, and his left(ish) policies seem on their way to being semi-safely routed through the circuitry of governance.
The cynic in me, perhaps in every New Yorker, wonders if there’s something plastic about his promises, or if he’s perhaps too good to be true. Zohran may not be able to stop the firing squads, but I for one trust that he’ll at least make sure we’ve all received our fair share of blindfolds and cigarettes.
Zohran can’t abolish the system, but he can dissent inside of it—a fact that has this city feeling, at least temporarily, relieved, even hopeful.
For more on what we at Bidoun loved in 2025, see our contributing editors’ offerings below—and do subscribe to this Substack if you haven’t yet!
And coming in 2026, a conversation with filmmaker Mira Nair, now known as the Mayor’s Mom, as she looks at the year ahead with us.
—Zain Khalid, Contributing Editor
The latest installment of A Protest Against Spaghetti, Bidoun's Substack newsletter, is up now — featuring a conversational profile of Sukhdev Sandhu and his latter-day mystery cult, the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture @colloquium_unpopular_culture … link in bio !
We’re launching a newsletter on substack ! Join us ❤️ link in bio … first installment features a conversation between @meriembennani@changeme2012 and @vnoujaim … & timely advice on things to read, watch or listen to this week …
Out today !
“Fact checking rewards the kinds of neuroses that can make me intolerable to friends and family. At work, I could chat without embarrassment about why I preferred Mahler’s tenth symphony to his ninth, or about the origins of the fascist accents on the columns at Grand Army Plaza. Still, I knew that certain things fell outside the protection granted by eccentricity, so I pretended my ambient anti-Americanism was ironic, the product of reading too much critical theory in college.”
In House Arab, a young fact checker at one of America’s most prestigious magazines finds himself increasingly isolated in the months after October 7th. As the sole Arabic-speaker on the editorial staff, he is slowly driven over the edge by the work of adjudicating the facticity of events unfolding in Palestine.
An autofictional portrait of a conscience in crisis, by Ismail Ibrahim.
Link in bio
Just out! A dream diary by Naguib Mahfouz, introduced by Hisham Matar. Photos by Diana Matar.
Link in bio.
From Hisham’s introduction:
I met Naguib Mahfouz for the first and only time at a secret location in Cairo. This was after October 15, 1994, the day he was attacked in one of the alleyways he frequented on his daily walk, by a stranger who stabbed him repeatedly in the neck. The story goes that Mahfouz took himself to the hospital and waited his turn, pressing his hand — the same hand with which he had, by this time, written over forty novels, a couple of memoirs, and several hundred articles — against the open gash in the side of his neck, telling the nurse, in his characteristically soft voice, at once informal and given to conviviality, “It’s nothing serious,” before revealing to her the fountain of blood…
So begins Hisham Matar’s introduction to “At the Border of the Night,” a selection from the dream diaries of the late lion of Egyptian letters, Naguib Mahfouz. Shortly after his near-death experience, Mahfouz began to record his nocturnal encounters in the world of dreams in brief yet evocative entries — a practice that ended only with his passing in 2006 at the age of 94.
