BIDOUN

Out now on substack, Zain Khalid on the World Cup: “Whatever this country starts, it inevitably ends in the most embarrassing way possible. Post Malone, aka White Iverson, headlined the close of the games in New Jersey, with Madonna (representing the US), BTS (all of Asia), Justin Bieber (Canada? Let’s say Canada), Shakira (Latin America), and Burna Boy (Africa) interrupting the game with the second-ever World Cup halftime show. On the sidelines, Elmo made a new friend in Tom Cruise. One is a puppet, the other is on Sesame Street. Both are globally legible intellectual properties.”

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Now out on substack: Zain Khalid on the World Cup and American Spectacle. “Whatever this country starts, it inevitably ends in the most embarrassing way possible. Post Malone, aka White Iverson, headlined the close of the games in New Jersey, with Madonna (representing the US), BTS (all of Asia), Justin Bieber (Canada? Let’s say Canada), Shakira (Latin America), and Burna Boy (Africa) interrupting the game with the second-ever World Cup halftime show. On the sidelines, Elmo made a new friend in Tom Cruise. One is a puppet, the other is on Sesame Street. Both are globally legible intellectual properties.”

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“Whatever this country starts, it inevitably ends in the most embarrassing way possible.” Zain Khalid on American spectacle during the World Cup. On our sub stack, A Protest Against Spaghetti … free to subscribe, link in BIO

Bidoun Mix is back … For the musician Asma Maroof, sometimes known as Asmara, collaboration is alpha and omega. She has worked with such Bidounish artists as Fatima Al Qadiri, Sophia Al-Maria, and MIA (RIP), along with a slew of others, including Kelela, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Trajal Harrell. Her output spans contemporary art, film, theater, fashion, and club culture; you almost certainly know her by her work, if not her name. Maroof’s most recent release is The Sport of Love (2025, PAN), a sonic meditation on latter-day romanticism, made in collaboration with Patrick Belaga and Tapiwa Svosve. Alongside Daniel Pineda, her partner in life and work, she has been making music for nearly two decades as Nguzunguzu—a touchstone for twenty-first century musicians entranced by the possibilities of global club music.

In person, Maroof can be painfully modest. As ardent fans, we asked her to revive the Bidoun Mix tradition with “Moon Bouncers,” a playlist for a waning summer.

Out on substack: Venice dispatches by Quinn Latimer, Sumayya Vally, Yasmine Seale, Emily Jacir, Ken Okiishi, Sam Thorne, Alia Al-Senussi, Rosin Tapponi, Sophia Al-Maria, and Momtaza Mehri

WE LOVE KOYO KOUOH’s conceit for the main exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale: an invitation to block out the phallocratic noise and tune in to the whisper, the seam, the off-piste, and the trace. To listen for what might rise from below. At a time when the blundering, self-appointed “masters of the universe” wield their power to devastating effect, Kouoh’s delicately assured proposition seemed poised to deliver one of the more intriguing curatorial experiments in the Biennale’s 130-year history.

So it was devastating that Kouoh herself did not live to see her vision through. The fifty-seven-year-old curator passed away in May 2025, not even halfway through her term with the world’s oldest and highest-profile art exhibition. She was only the second African to serve as artistic director, after Okwui Enwezor, another international art animateur who died too young, at age fifty-five, in 2019. The task of realizing Kouoh’s vision for her exhibition, titled In Minor Keys, was ultimately taken up by a group of her colleagues and friends: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi.

At any biennial, there is always too much happening, at the main events and on the margins: collateral shows, performances, talks, DIY projects. At Venice this year, all manner of controversies gave rise to solidarities in action, direct and indirect—strikes, sit-ins, contestations, and convivialities—like a whole world in parallel. We invited a clutch of curators, critics, artists, architects, and others to write about the art, events, and experiences that provoked them. What follows are thoughts and responses by Sophia Al-Maria, Alia Al-Senussi, Emily Jacir, Quinn Latimer, Momtaza Mehri, Ken Okiishi, Yasmine Seale, Roisin Tapponi, Sam Thorne, and Sumayya Vally.

Out today in our substack, A Protest Against Spaghetti

In 2000, in Paris, the artist Marjane Satrapi published the first installment of Persepolis, a memoir of her Iranian childhood before and after the 1979 Revolution, told in the form of a black-and-white comic book. With the wide release of an English-language translation four years later, Satrapi received rapturous praise for her simple yet elegant artwork and sharp yet self-deprecating humor, even while telling harrowing tales. A 2007 animated film of Persepolis cemented the book’s reputation.

When news spread earlier this month that Satrapi had passed away at the age of 56, tributes poured in from across the globe. There were critiques, too. When we asked the scholar Naghmeh Sohrabi, author-convenor of the invaluable newsletter These Are the True Things, for her thoughts, she described the conflicted mix of misgiving and admiration that Persepolis provoked when she first read it, decades ago — a “shock of recognition along with an uncomfortable feeling of being misrepresented.” (Like Satrapi, Sohrabi came of age in 1980s Iran, during the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war that followed.) This week at A Protest Against Spaghetti, we’re delighted to publish her reflections on Satrapi’s defining work and its complicated legacies.

Venice May 6, 2026 Etel Adnan book launch in ’s French pavilion thank you and all of our readers: Eungie Joo, Joana Hadjithomas, Pedro Barbosa, Hiba Abid, Mario Garcia Torres, Mercedes Vilardell, Michele Lamy, Ken Okiishi, Barbara Cassavechia, Quinn Latimer, Farah Al Qasimi, Maia Hawad, Meriem Bennani, Sophia Al Maria, Stuart Comer …

Reading and launch in Venice next week ‘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

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 A LND 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.