Bidoun #7 : Tourism

Letter from the Editor - Lisa Farjam

"In this issue of Bidoun, we take on shifting notions of tourism, the tourist, and travel in general as starting points for a larger discussion about the intersection of experience, representation, desire, and voyeurism.

The cynical view of tourism is that the carefree days of being lost in another place, space, and time are long gone. Those with enough money are the recipients of carefully controlled experiences edited for easy consumption. Visitors are told to look here, stand there, photograph this, and stand solemn before that. Some skirt traditional tourism by participating in alternative tourist economies-eco — tourism, ethno-tourism, and helper tourism among them. Others obsess over accessing the newest, often most bizarre attractions — traveling halfway around the world to ski in Dubai (in August), to check into the latest boutique hotel in Micronesia, or, alternatively, to gaze down into the site of the former World Trade Center in New York.

Nevertheless, crowds still flock to the typical destinations: Caribbean shores, European monuments, and the sites of antiquities in the Middle East. They go through the motions, making mini-pilgrimages in pursuit of pleasure or History (usually filtered through the lens of a digi-cam), leaving lots of money behind in the process.

You may find that at times we gloss over the actual destinations, instead looking at the people and economies servicing them and the ideas that inspire trips (loosely defined) in the first place. It’s not the two-week trips to the Andes to build latrines that concern us, but rather, the context that created the possibility of taking those trips, the instinct that drives people to sign up. In the end, our relationships to tourism define not only our sense of self, but also how we conceive of leisure, representation, and privilege.

Finally, we explore issues related to tourism that are intimately linked to the Middle East. A series of impressionistic reviews document a number of the region’s airport and hotels — some more off the beaten track than others. Serge Michel considers the journey of the kidnapped and Nagmeh Sohrabi inverts the traditional accounts of us being viewed by them — recounting Nasir al-Din Shah’s first tour to Paris in 1873. Also within, George Pendle sketches a historical path from pilgrim to tourist to artist, while Tirdad Zolghadr unleashes his critical wrath on guidebooks past and present. For our artists’ commissions, Yaron Leshem probes the universal appeal of war paraphernalia with his photographs of tourists posing on the Intrepid in New York City, and Laleh Khorramian recounts the tale of a ship voyage gone awry.

Bon Voyage!"

Featuring :

News
ANTONIA CARVER
Previews
BIDOUN
Modern Incline Modern Decline
FRANCESCO BONAMI
Mustafa Hulusi
EMILY SPEERS MEARS
Oreet Ashery’s Travel Diary
EMILY SPEERS MEARS
Sight Seers
GEORGE PENDLE
State of the Arts Education
CLARE DAVIES
Syria’s National Museum
HUGH MACLEOD
Damascus Airport
HUGH MACLEOD
Notes on Tehran’s Mehrabad and Imam Khomeini International Airports
EVA MUNZ
Biennial Airways
SERHAT IZDAMAN
The Pygmies Were Our Compass
TIRDAD ZOLGHADR
The Rumblings of a Conscience
MATTHEW CARRINGTON
Going to Sea in a Sieve
CURTIS BROWN
An Artist’s Romp at Art Basel Miami
FATIMA ROUISSI
New Orleans Land, New Orleans World
STEPHEN G. RHODES
Swiss Airlines flight from Tehran to Zurich, August 2006
BIDOUN
On Good Deeds
BIDOUN
Never Forget to Remember
KEN OKIISHI
Thoughts on Kidnapping
SERGE MICHEL
Doing Business with the Business World
TIRDAD ZOLGHADR
Redolent Delusions
NAGHMEH SOHRABI
Cautious Radicals
ANTONIA CARVER
Abu Symbol
KARTHIK PANDIAN
Sacha Baron Cohen: Borat vs. Kazakhstan
BRIAN ACKLEY
Sacha Baron Cohen: Ali G vs. Boutros Boutros Ghali
SUZANNE VON LEDEBUR, TAN WÄLCHLI
Hotel Naderi Tehran
NEGAR AZIMI
Hotel Four Seasons Istanbul
FAOUZI ROUISSI
Hotel Four Seasons Damascus
HUGH MACLEOD
Hotel Carlton Cairo
BIDOUN
Khartoum’s Hotel Acropole
ELIZABETH RUBIN
Hotel MIR Moscow
SHIRANA SHAHBAZI
On Pirates, Statisticians and Cruise Ship Directors
NADER VOSSOUGHIAN
Living Only Once
KAMRAN RASTEGAR
Notes on Watching Syriana and Munich
BRUCE HAINLEY
Winter Film Festival Diary
YAHIA LABABIDI, ANTONIA CARVER, SIMONA SCHNEIDER
Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo
COCO FERGUSON
Makhmalbaf’s Sex and Philosophy Reconsidered
KAMYAR MOHSENIN
Homo Sapiens Are What They Call Us
EUGENE HÜTZ, ROOTSMAN
Transcendental Ruckus
NATHAN SALSBURG
Hisham’s Top Ten
HISHAM BHAROOCHA
Homeworks III
TIRDAD ZOLGHADR
Homeworks III (Another Regard)
TONY CHAKAR
Sixth African Photography Encounters
DIDIER DE FAŸS
Tamy Ben-Tor
MARY BLAIR TAYLOR
Contemporary Curves
WEJDAN ALMANNAI
Attitude
SUZANA MILEVSKA
Projekt Migration
NAV HAQ
PhotoCairo 3
CLARE DAVIES
Borga Kantürk and Ahmet Ögüt
ERDEN KOSOVA
Documents from the Atlas Group Archive
BRYAN BIGGS
Ethnographic Tales
CHRISTOPHER PINNEY
Art Market
ANTONIA CARVER