“THERE’S A POWER IN HAVING A PLATFORM, SURE, ESPECIALLY SINCE PEOPLE DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST.”
By BRIAN J. SHOLIS

On a rainy Friday morning in September, I sat down for coffee with Negar Azimi, managing editor of Bidoun, a publication dedicated to Middle Eastern arts and culture. Azimi, a Harvard graduate student living in New York, is quick-witted and opinionated, two characteristics much in evidence during our discussion, which discussed the state of the arts in that region as much as the magazine itself.

BRIAN J. SHOLIS: How does Bidoun avoid interpretations of images of Arabic people and their creative efforts as either kitsch, on the one hand, or as fetish items, on the other?
NEGAR AZIMI: It’s tricky. I think we’re at a moment where it’s very easy to fetishize anything visual from the Middle East. We’ve shown images in Bidoun in fact, these martyrs’ images from the Iran-Iraq war, and they’re totally seductive. These men are often striking, eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds in 1980, and they have this incredibly defiant look. They’re ready to march into war. And of course, the framing of the war was very dramatic. And yet it’s easy to look at those images in isolation and think of them as kitsch. We can’t control how people consume the images we put out there, but we can go to lengths to think critically about our own framing. We do this by avoiding the tendency to be authoritative or absolutist, by providing context – sure this is a sexy image of a young Iranian martyr practically wearing lipstick, but there’s also a formidable photographic history behind it, for example – and so on. Perhaps you can say that mainstream accounts of this part of the world tend to abstract history, nuance, and we try to move one step closer to enlarging the conversation, reinserting that nuance and, even, complexity at times.

You mentioned that the magazine has just moved to a new office, and that there are two editors now working under editor-in-chief Lisa Farjam. But you’re obviously still working with people around the world. Can you explain how the current issue – which just went to press this week – came together?
Well, we’re still working by e-mail and the Internet. I just recently moved to New York, and having two of us here (myself and Lisa), along with creative director Ketuta Meskhisvili and designer Cindy Heller, is going to make a difference, I think. At a certain point, conversations over the phone and over e-mail get exhausting. But we’ll still operate largely thanks to the Internet. Previously the magazine had four editors, and never was there a moment when all four of us were together in one room. There have been three of us in different arrangements, for example at the Istanbul Biennial or at the Frieze Art Fair, but there was always someone missing. [laughs] The newest issue took its inspiration from early issues of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. “Interviews” is the theme. I would like to call it “Conversations,” to be honest, because “Interviews” implies a power relation, one that I think Warhol was very aware of. Anyway, these are closer to conversations. In some cases they are between two publicly known figures, in other cases one person isn’t publicly known. Hopefully the mix destabilizes the idea of the notable interviewee. In a way, I think the magazine can be confusing. It has the arts-and-culture rubric, which a lot of other magazines – Cabinet, for example – have. Now we’re trying to destabilize that a little bit, to focus more on the intersection of art and politics. Part of that is born from our immediate context, of being from the Middle East, a part of the world where the arts are necessarily political. We realize that in this region (and among the members of its diaspora) you can’t talk about an art exhibition, or a piece of video art, without talking about politics – even national security in some cases. We’re moving toward a more explicit acknowledgement of this, though I don’t know if this will be visible to our readers. For example, in the “Interviews” issue, we have the head of the Iraqi National Archive in one feature. He lives in a besieged country; he’s working under very difficult conditions. The transcript of the interview is not only about the state of the archives and the potential of culture in a country that’s at war, but also about the fact that his driver was shot in the head the day before. This is the kind of stuff that doesn’t happen when you talk with a curator at the Metropolitan Museum. There’s a power in having a platform, sure, especially since people don’t know much about the Middle East. Recently for example I’ve tried to bring in Iraq and issues related to Iraq because we don’t know what’s going on there. There are very few reporters who actually access it. It’s partly because arts and culture seem like a “low priority” given what’s happening.

So in that sense I think this issue is a move in that direction. It seems that to date the magazine has been very promotional – though of course I don’t mean that term pejoratively. I mean that it has offered a wide spread of arts and culture coming from the Middle East. It’s smart and interrogative, yes, but not yet explicitly responsive to current events. Is the magazine now looking to achieve a certain topicality – in your editorial vision – that is separate from the inherent topicality of the art under discussion?
I think that if “promotional” is the sense that you got from the magazine, then we’re doing something wrong. [laughs] First, we can only talk about multiple art scenes, and some are admittedly more interesting to us than others. What we do know, however, is that there are things happening in these cities – Beirut and Cairo, for example – that are exciting to us, that make sense to us, that we think have some resonance with what is happening here, in the West. We think they deserve a platform. But we almost excessively want to emphasize that this isn’t about representation, or about being authoritative, or about saying, “This is what’s happening in the Middle East.” Because there is a lot happening that doesn’t interest us, or doesn’t show up on our radar. One thing that we’re proud of is that Bidoun is a space in which you have established Western writers in the same space as young Egyptian bloggers, or someone who runs a heavy metal band in Tehran. This is, in a sense, unprecedented. But if you ask me what direction we’re going in, I think we need a little bit more of that young Egyptian blogger rather than the big names who also write for Vanity Fair. But a lot remains that we don’t know about. We need to have more editors actually based in cities in that region. We certainly don’t want to run the risk of looking like kids with exotic names, who are based in New York City or London and are somehow picking and choosing the most glamorous aspects of that part of the world. I think of Bidoun as a kind of continuum. We’re moving in a certain direction, but we have a long way to go in terms of digging out those voices. A lot of that, of course, has to do with translation. I think what we’d like to do now is initiate a translation project in which we’d look for young writers in that part of the world – in those parts of the world.

And here I should say that our vision of the Middle East is really fluid. It doesn’t begin at Morocco and end at Afghanistan. We also say that maybe in ten years it won’t be a Middle Eastern magazine. I think we’re pioneering an ethic that defies geography.

What characterizes that ethic?
Well, first, we’re not – and I think this is always in the opening pages of our magazine – a knee-jerk response to Orientalism. But there is a self-awareness of how fraught it is to have a geographic rubric. We’re very aware that we’re cultural products. As a response, there may even be a kind of excessive distancing, awareness, and acknowledgement of the larger structures that make us who we are. So, for example, you have an Islamic art exhibition at MoMA, or museums around the world building their Middle Eastern collections, and Bidoun is obviously a part of that. We don’t distance ourselves from it, but we’re aware of it, and there’s an undercutting sarcasm, a self-referentiality that allows us to be a part of an ethnic market as well. Perhaps we overcompensate in our attempt to stay away from clichés about that part of the world – something like Shirin Neshat’s work, for example. This is almost a hackneyed example, but she is certainly someone from the Middle East who has reached some sort of iconic status, at least in the art world …

… the Western art world.
Yes. Though it’s interesting because she also has currency in Iran, among young people who want to be part of that art world. She’s the one who made it. Without any disrespect to her – I’m totally seduced by her work – we try to be aware of the art market that created and sustains her, and its vision of her as exotica. So when I talk about ethics and positioning – because a magazine inevitably positions itself – we have an awareness that we can be seductive for sometimes the wrong reasons. We don’t bitch about it; we try to turn it on its head. I just spent four months in the Middle East, I just got back, and it’s devastating to think about how little people know about that part of the world. It’s not that they should know more about the Middle East at the expense of South Asia or Latin America or Northern Europe. But the Middle East happens to be a part of the world that is quite a large part of public discourse at the moment, and it is framed in monolithic terms, so an arts-and-culture magazine, even if it is just arts and culture, can play a part in that larger dialogue about what’s happening there.

That larger dialogue is inevitably inflected – if not overwhelmingly dominated – by politics, and, to take the case of Lebanon, the war between Hezbollah forces and Israel. For example, the gallery Espace SD recently opened an exhibition called “Nafas Beirut” (“Beirut’s Breath,” or, less literally, “Beirut Is Breathing Again”), which features 45 artworks made explicitly in response to what is called the July War. Given that Beirut has what you call one of the Middle East’s more interesting art scenes, do you foresee Bidoun addressing these issues more directly?
Beirut is a perfect point of departure for when you want to engage the intersections of art and politics. There’s something very particular about that place, its relationship to history, documents, representation – and a lot of that is manifest in the artistic expression coming out of the city. This was the case before this latest war, and it was also the case during previous wars. Akram Zaatari, Lamia Joreige, Walid Raad, and the Atlas Group – there are many, many examples of artists who are reacting to a particular time and space, in some cases because it’s the only way they can react, or know how to. As a magazine that is committed to providing a platform for expression from the Middle East, Beirut’s art scene is inevitably going to figure into what we do. You mentioned an exhibition at Espace SD; I imagine we’re just beginning to see the breadth and diversity of reactions to this latest war coming out of that country – whether artistic or not. With regard to whether or not it is our “duty” to react, or to address the war, I think it’s much more intuitive than that.

In previous interviews, Bidoun editors have stated that there didn’t seem to be a Middle Eastern precedent for the magazine, no publication specifically dedicated to arts and culture, with decent-to-high production values, nicely designed, etc. Were there instead Western precedents on which you modeled Bidoun? Also, is there an indigenous print culture related to the arts that exists but perhaps isn’t as glossy? Lastly, has something come in Bidoun’s wake, other Middle Eastern magazines that have started after seeing your publication as a successful model?
First of all, Bidoun wouldn’t exist without the art scenes in the Middle East. We’re not creating a movement; we’re on the tail end of a movement. The fact that we exist is a testament to the fact that there are things happening. What we contribute is English-language coverage of things previously inaccessible to Western audiences, a fact that is one of our weaknesses as well. Though one could also say that there is value in its inter-regional distribution, it’s not solely a Middle East-to-West hand-holding exercise. It’s expensive to travel in the Middle East: Egyptians don’t often go to Beirut, and vice-versa, unless you’re talking about a very particular elite. In that sense we’re thinking about creating connections between these cities as well. There was no magazine like Bidoun when we started. In our wake? There is a new magazine called Canvas that also has high production values. It comes out of the Gulf. I would say that it caters more to people in that part of the world than ours does. There are art scenes, art markets in cities like Cairo, or elsewhere in the Gulf region, that are very self-contained, that tend to stick to traditional art mediums, and that have their own markets, buyers, and collecting circles, and Canvas, an English-language, glossy publication, caters to them.

Is it based in the United Arab Emirates?
Yes, Dubai, I think. There is some overlap between our publications, but Canvas is more orthodox, traditional. It caters more to a collector; it’s more strictly art-centric. We’re happy they’ve launched. Anything we can do to help initiate more publications we’ll try to do. Our biggest problems are theirs as well: we’re in English; we’re an expensive magazine. In cities like Beirut it sells really well, because it’s more bourgeois, more cosmopolitan, the standard of living is a bit higher than in other cities. But in a place like Cairo, it’s exorbitantly priced – ten dollars. Even when we depress the price there, it’s hard to buy. To return briefly to where we’re going: I’d like us to think about these issues, translation and price. Perhaps a supplement, a newspaper insert containing four articles from the issue that have been translated into Turkish, French, Arabic, and Farsi. Perhaps this is a symbolic act, to start. Other magazines that we model ourselves on include Transition, run by Mike Vasquez, who I spend a lot of time with. It’s a literary journal that was launched in Uganda in 1961, now published by the Du Bois Institute at Harvard. It doesn’t define itself as such, but I’d say it’s a Paris Review with an editorial board that spans Kwame Anthony Appiah to Cornel West to Toni Morrison. You can look at it and say, “It’s a journal of color,” in our vernacular sense of the term. It privileges good writing, looks at the fringe, the underground, idiosyncratic cultures. It has an African tendency. It’s a journal that I adore. We’d love to have the reportage that, for example, Granta has. But that’s tricky, because digging up writers who write in Arabic or Farsi and then translating their efforts inevitably means that some of what makes them special is lost.

And having a billionaire owner of the magazine is something you don’t have quite yet …
No, not at all. There are pieces of Frieze that we love; George Pendle, who writes regularly for that magazine, also contributes to Bidoun. George doesn’t write about the arts in a strict sense, and that’s part of why he makes sense to us. There’s also a great journal published in Lebanon called Zawaya, an Arabic-language publication that is wonderfully designed. It tends to privilege photography and video, but it remains a fantastic local initiative. It might be nice to eventually work with them. There is also a literary journal in Egypt called Amkenah, which has been around for a long time, and which publishes great things as well. As much as we can, we like to collaborate with these magazines, to draw on each other’s resources. But there is a dearth of good art criticism in the Middle East – in any language. It sounds like such a vast generalization, and there are always exceptions, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that a lot of art criticism is descriptive, it’s about the columnists’ favorites or friends. It’s cronyism. So I think that one project Bidoun is very interested in is holding a conference or workshop – or a series of workshops – in which we talk about the state of art criticism in the Middle East, and perhaps pick out some young art writers from these cities and pair them with some from here in New York and have a colloquium.

And where would that take place?
Well, something along the lines of an art criticism workshop … We’re doing something in collaboration with the documenta 12 magazine project, in Germany. But, ideally, something like that would be long-term, sustainable, not a one-off event. It would probably take place at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, an interesting contemporary art space in that part of the world.

One could say perhaps that in the wider social arena in the United States, visual art is marginal, at least in terms of its ability to effect social or political issues. This might require a certain specificity in your answer – speaking of individual cities or countries rather than the region – but what is the relative status of visual art in those cultures? Is a visual artist in either of those countries somebody of greater social stature, in the sense that people look to him or her for answers to questions that society is asking?
This is an interesting question, because artists are disempowered, in that they’re off the radar, you know, when you talk about a police state. Art seems like it is the least threatening thing for the government to be concerned about. But it’s because of that – the privileging or prioritizing of threats to one’s regime, ideology, or worldview that places art low on that list – they have a great power. In Iran’s case, you haven’t seen a huge amount of censorship of the arts. There are obvious examples – nudes and the like – that are no-brainers, and it could be seen as stupid to even engage in that kind of confrontation. You can negotiate the existing codes or you can blatantly flout them … but for the sake of what? Attention? Bidoun of course has to think similarly, in terms of what we print, but I think we do it in a fairly savvy way. We’re not interested in being banned; we don’t want the door closed on us immediately. But in a country like Iran, the government is so busy “taking care of” political dissidents that the arts are ripe for the kind of dialogue that one can’t have in a newspaper editorial. But even in the art colleges, where the artists are doing low-tech work, they’re doing work that’s quite political, and it’s simply off the government’s radar. Galleries, the arts – it seems like so frivolous an occupation that it doesn’t seem threatening yet. In that sense, I think, there’s a potential.

Is that potential in the process of being recognized? If “unofficial,” do these artists nonetheless have attention drawn to their efforts? For example, if one has a gallery in the Middle East, can one expect twenty people to come during open hours on a Saturday? Or fifty? Or two?
Well, of course you can’t talk about Iran in the same breath as Beirut here, but I’ll talk about Iran first. In Iran, you have a very bizarre tendency toward lens-based work, photography and film …

Perhaps attendant to the strength of the cinematic culture there?
Well, previous to that, the first cameras came to Iran under the aegis of Nasser-e-Din Shah, then the ruler of Iran, in the late 19^th century. He was interested in photography, and brought the first cameras to the country – I think from Russia. He photographed his harem and his wives. At that time, photography was certainly an elitist enterprise, but it entered the Iranian consciousness quite early on in its own development. If you look at early studio photography in Iran, from the early part of the 20^th century, which was the Iranian people’s first encounter with identity photographs, birth certificate documents, etc., there is a particular iconography that could be described as Iranian, something that you don’t see in other Middle Eastern countries. There has always been something about Iranians and photographs, and the legacy now is that we have a generation of young photographers and filmmakers that are phenomenal. Anyway, I think that, proportionally, Iran has a density of talented artists. Tehran is a big concrete jungle, of course, with lots of young people, but it’s just phenomenal the numbers that turn out for a photo show. Literally there are throngs of people. It’s something you don’t see in New York, even. Part of that is hunger. The arts are a vehicle to the outside; the gallery is as public as space gets. Galleries become a collecting space for young people. But this tendency toward photography, video, and film is very peculiar, and I think there are both producers and an audience that contribute to that. Also, quite a few photographers and filmmakers teach at the art colleges, and they have the privilege of traveling for their shows in other countries, and bring back contact with the outside world for their students. They seem more connected to a global, outside world. I had mentioned Shirin Neshat earlier, because she is both an icon and an inspiration for a lot of artists, but she has also, in some ways, ruined [laughs] a generation of artists – she has created a generation of bad video artists that tries to copy her work. The result is often disastrous: stark, searingly iconic, somewhat cheesy Orientalist images. I don’t blame her …

It’s an after effect of her fame …
They see that she has a show at the Guggenheim, or wherever, and say to themselves, “This is what it takes to make it. If I have to play up my ethnic card, so be it.” You know, Iranian women are more empowered than women in most of the other countries in the Middle East; relatively speaking, they live phenomenally normal lives. But the suffering Iranian woman has a certain artworld cache, and this manifests itself sometimes in new art. Lebanon is also a country with a really strong art scene. I think a lot of that – well, a certain generation of artists was educated outside of Lebanon, like Walid Raad, though he stayed out and works in the US. Akram Zaatari went to the New School for a period. A lot were educated in France; some went to RISD in the US. There’s also a generation of architects like Bernard Khoury. Many came back, and that’s what’s unique about Lebanon, at least after the civil war. These artists and architects took part in the reconstruction of the city. A lot of their work deals with the trauma of the war, the trauma of return, the question of how history is constructed. All told, there’s something very powerful happening there, which is both about geography but also defies it. Most movements – Fluxus, for example – come from a very specific time and place, and why shouldn’t something like that happen in Lebanon? There is already something happening there, born out of a generation’s historical experience, their “in-betweenness” …

And it’s something that you see as beginning to have contours, to take shape?
Yes. It’s a really vibrant arts scene. Small, but very savvy. They know how to market themselves. There was recently a show at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, in England, which I thought was a testament to this. It’s unfortunate that it was placed under a geographic rubric, but … we had a panel discussion with one of the artists, a cultural organizer named Stephen Wright, Catherine David, and the exhibition curator Suzanne Cotter. It took on several questions: What are the politics of these geographic shows? Do they do more harm than good? I don’t think it makes sense to do an Egyptian show, for example, for there’s little that ties together contemporary Egyptian artists. There isn’t an ethic that runs through their work. There isn’t a set of references that they all share. But in Beirut you could start to talk about a movement, to talk in these terms. All these artists hang out with each other, they go to the same bars, they share very common experiences, and they collaborate. It’s very fascinating, but it’s specific to Beirut, and not necessarily happening in other cities. The city also has an art market, an art-going audience. It might be small, but it’s taken very seriously. One woman in particular, Christine Tohme, has done a lot of great things for Beirut. Two or three years ago she initiated an event called “The Forum” that invites cultural producers from all over the region, and those who live elsewhere, like Walid Raad, Emily Jacir, or Cabinet’s Sina Najafi, to come together and talk about a range of issues. It has put Beirut on the wider cultural map, in part because she brings in people from everywhere. It’s sophisticated and growing, a testament to the potential of what can happen in this part of the world. Given what’s happened recently, it’s interesting how quickly the art scene got it together. In the long run, we’ll have a whole generation of video works [laughs] that will reflect on this aggression. That legacy will certainly be there. But also art as a form of explicit activism: artists initiated projects in which they distributed cameras for people to document what was happening; there were live, streaming videos and other programs on the Internet. Art is entwined with the political reality there.

Let’s return to a subject you brought up in your discussion of Iran, the warped effect that someone like Shirin Neshat – or her success – has had on indigenous artistic production in the land where she comes from. Do you see Bidoun itself as having a similar effect, despite how self-conscious you are about wielding that kind of power, about being a conduit for an Middle East-to-West transmission machine?
A diplomatic tool.

Do you still fall into that trap? Do you see the magazine as being a conduit that will one day generate a parity in the public consciousness between the regions? And do you hope to one day create level-enough platforms that you can become, in a way, connoisseurs of Middle Eastern art in the way that people are with regard to certain types of Western art? Do you hope to apply that level of selectivity, to cut through …
The bullshit?

Yeah, the bullshit.
Well, no. Our bullshit is our bullshit. Partly what we do is a generational thing. Bidoun is also a small-scale enterprise. Some of the artists we’ve featured have gone on to wider renown, but some have their own thing going on, and others, like Paul Chan, have little or nothing to do with the Middle East.

Aside from his interest in the region and its people.
Right. And yet he makes sense for us. We’re not trying to pioneer a new clique, an alternative or an opposition to the hackneyed cultural products of the Middle East. Of course, there are icons like Neshat, like Mona Hatoum, whom we’d like to include – not with sarcastic asides – but I think what we’re less concerned with critiquing them than with critiquing the phenomenon that creates them. It’s the structures that sustain them …

And pin them down like butterflies …
Right. And so we want to open the door for artists who don’t fit our preconceptions of what art from the Middle East is about.

And as a way of countering the hegemonic influence of Western media and its focus upon people like Neshat and Hatoum, the intraregional distribution of Bidoun is equally important.
Right. There’s more to the region’s art than that, and much of it has nothing to do with, for example, Islam, or terrorism, or mixed identities. It’s not all miniatures that include Osama bin Laden. Post-9/11, collective eyes are on this part of the world – and again, tomorrow it could shift to Latin America – I think we’re at a moment where the mantle of “political art” is really easy to throw around, and I think a lot of artists recognize it and make that kind of gimmicky art. But what will last five years from now? To take one example, Okwui Enwezor’s documenta – I’ll go to hell for this, and I love Okwui and his work – had a clear line, one that runs through the catalogue, that’s largely about “us” and “them,” post-colonial anxieties. And while it didn’t start at that moment, I think it marked a turning point for a larger movement that has allowed people to get away with quite a bit, with making easy, reductive political statements. Ones that, if you’re a person of color, it is ten times easier to get away with making.

A kind of aesthetic affirmative action?
Sure. We all love to talk about the legacy of colonialism, or to bash Bush, but the good-guy-versus-bad-guy stuff is too easy to grasp. In a weird way it mirrors post-9/11 politics. Yet it’s happening to an exaggerated degree in the art world, and I wonder how a lot of this work will last, what its staying power will be. There is also, always, the question of authenticity, credentials, of “how Middle Eastern are you?” Those are the kinds of questions we try to stay away from. I don’t mean to articulate our editorial vision solely through what we don’t do, but what we choose to include is arrived at intuitively. Which is why it shifts. [laughs] Maybe we’ll become a Latin American art magazine. Bidoun – our name lends itself to this kind of thinking.

The magazine becomes a roving spotlight …
Yes. And perhaps, in the current art market that is seen as aggressively alternative. But it’s not a conscious decision on our part. We feel the representational responsibility occasionally, but not very much. [laughs] Perhaps we should take it more seriously.

Well, as your distribution increases, and your power of legitimization increases, it seems natural to have to take those things into consideration, especially in the absence of other media outlets doing what you do. In that situation, any decision you make becomes a kind of anointing. It may be too soon to tell whether the success of those you’ve featured is a testament to your taste or an example of this particular power you hold.
Well, in the case of Yto Barrada, who we’ve featured, she doesn’t necessarily need our platform. It’s not charity. We’ve commissioned work from her, but the first time we included her was for the cinemathèque project she initiated in Morocco. It was very important for us to devote attention to a cinema that opened up in Tangiers, given the dearth of art spaces in the region. It is a big deal, and was a big deal for us. And this is where Bidoun gets into the realm of “development.”

And is this foundation-type organizational structure something you plan to focus on? Will the exhibitions, symposia, lecture series, etc., be increasingly prominent?
Well, this is something that we got into somewhat accidentally. And while there’s no limit to what we should do, our priorities should remain with the magazine, otherwise we’ll be spreading ourselves too thin. But why not think broadly? For example, there are few books about art written in Arabic. Farsi is a slightly different situation, but in Arabic there is very little art criticism. In Iran you get a lot of translations – Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss translated – but where is the book written by an Iranian art critic, available in Farsi and translated into English? There’s a vacuum or a void that we hope Bidoun can help fill. Events, film screenings, it’s that kind of thing-ness that we have that defies categorization and helps us to undertake these things. It starts as a magazine, but then it becomes – and this is where I get really visionary – well, a phenomenon. A position. One that’s not fixed, but alternative … both with regard to the art world and in terms of ways of looking at the part of the world that we know the most about, the Middle East.