Bidoun Library
15 December - 15 February 2013
The Bidoun Library, founded in 2009 by Bidoun Projects, is a mobile library consisting of books, magazines and other printed matter.
Originally conceived as an itinerant collection of hard-to-find books traveling to cultural organizations in the US and Europe, the Bidoun Library has since evolved into a conceptual project that tracks the different ways in which print culture has been implicated in articulating the vexed concept of the “Middle East.” Its strategy is, in the consideration of books, periodicals and printed matter as objects, subject to the incentives of material production and beholden to complex and historically contingent objectives.
For the Point Centre for Contemporary Art, the Bidoun Library will present a thematic version of the Library built around espionage, the legacies of state-sponsored publishing, and the cultural Cold War. A site-specific subsection will be built around the assassination of the Egyptian writer Yussef el Sebai —himself the General Secretary of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Movement among many other roles—at the Hilton Hotel in Nicosia on February 18, 1978.