After the People's Revolution, Osama Kamal looks at the People's Art An art that is not confined within the walls of a museum reaches straight out to its audience. When it comes to graffiti no curators are needed, no framing is required, no insurance, no transport and no handling. No wonder graffiti has taken Cairo by storm since the 25 January Revolution, progressing from an endeavour for the few --as it was from the 1980s -- to a pursuit with thousands of adherents, including some who would not normally frequent such a formal institution as a museum. Mohamed Mahmoud Street: pedestrians pause to admire the paintings on the wall, cars slow down to take a furtive glimpse of work that is of exceptional quality as well as of intense immediacy. Since the November clashes on Mohamed Mahmoud Street which left 41 dead and dozens injured, the walls of this street between Tahrir Square and Mansour Street have been plastered with revolutionary art. The artists who created it are not commonly known to the public, or even in conventional art circles. They came public, however, to talk about their politics and practices at a recent event held by the American University in Cairo, a fitting venue as the AUC walls particularly have been a focus point for the practitioners of this artistic phenomenon. As part of the Translation Lecture series, the AUC Centre for Translation Studies and the department of Rhetoric and Composition hosted a discussion on "Visualising Revolution: the Epic Murals of Tahrir," at the Ewart Memorial Hall on 2 April. Attending the discussion were Ammar Abu Bakr, Alaa Awad and Hanaa El-Dogheim, all experienced artists who have recently gravitated to the world of graffiti. Abu Bakr, 32, is a teaching assistant in the College of Fine Arts in Luxor. His work on the walls of Mohamed Mahmoud includes a mural for lost eyes, an image of Sheikh Emad Effat and a homage to the victims of the Port Said football carnage. Abu Bakr, who has been fascinated by folk art since childhood, regards graffiti as a traditional form of documentation. "The conventional folk artist has recorded all kinds of nationalistic and religious events on the walls of houses, forming a visual memory with his paintings for the place and the people. The folk artist knew that his paintings would fade and eventually disappear, but this didn't blunt his enthusiasm. This can be seen in spectacular images of pilgrimage one sees all over the country." In the lost-eye mural, Abu Bakr portrayed the outcome of bloody clashes between police and demonstrators. "The clashes resulted in dozens losing their eyes. Men and women, veiled women and unveiled, young and old, and people from all walks of life, from across the political spectrum, of varying religious creeds, became half blind." In one of Abu Bakr's paintings, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi appears with a missing eye. The words "your eye" written nearby can be seen as an indictment of the SCAF's involvement in the clashes. One of the most haunting images in Abu Bakr's graffiti is that of Sheikh Emad Effat, the Azharite scholar who was killed in clashes near the cabinet offices. "The death of Sheikh Effat on 16 December 2011 caused an outpouring of emotion, because he symbolised both piety and revolution, two things that the nation relates to. I drew him with wings, a martyr in heaven, and wrote verses of the Qu'ran beside his image." Abu Bark's portrayal of the Ultras, the football fans who died in Port Said, has also attracted widespread attention. Abu Bakr says that he was already working on a mural the night the Port Said carnage took place. "The Port Said horror sent shockwaves into Tahrir Square. The torrent of anger propelled me to work and create. Some may think that the football mural was well-thought-out in advance, but this is not true. The mural was completely spontaneous and went into several stages of modification and addition until it took its final shape. I stressed the faces of the martyrs in their full detail, with the names for everyone to see. They were the victims of a despicable plot." According to Abu Bakr, graffiti is not an art that aspires to immortality, but one that is meant to capture immediate emotion. "Graffiti monitors and documents a collective state of mind through which the country is passing. Therefore it is connected to the event, to the streets. It is street art." Like Abu Bakr, Alaa Awad, 31, is a teaching assistant at the College of Fine Arts in Luxor. It was Awad who painted most of the pharaonic imagery on Mohamed Mahmoud. "I have always been impressed with pharaonic art. And once I started living in Luxor, my connection to pharaonic art became stronger. All my murals in Mohamed Mahmoud are inspired by ancient art, albeit with a modified and more contemporaneous feel." In what he calls the Martyrs' Mural, Awad shows the victims of revolutionary clashes going straight to heaven, to a place of love and joy. In The Tribunal of Darkness, he portrays the scales of justice as being off balance, a comment on the lack of justice for the martyrs. The Cat and Mouse mural shows a mouse lounging in a state of repose while a cat, apparently his servant, is using a fan to keep him cool. In the Girl and Bull mural, a young girl in ancient Egyptian attire is taming a strong bull. Both allegories symbolise the intricacies of a struggle in which right may not have enough might, but has all the brains. Awad says his art is not just an attempt to call attention to Egypt's true identity, but to refute the arguments of the extremists who wish to repress all forms of artistic expression. In one of his murals we see among the pharaonic faces the likeness of Abdel-Moneim El-Shahhat, the official spokesman of the Salfi Nour Party. Shahhat is particularly known for his recurring tirades against art and culture. Hanaa El-Dogheim, 35, who lives between Germany and Cairo, is a graduate of Cairo's College of Fine Arts and a newcomer to the world of graffiti. She says that there is a lot an artist can do with graffiti that would be hard to accomplish in the seclusion of an art space. "Substituting a private studio with the immensity of an open air venue can be jarring at first. But with the help of artist colleagues, and because I really wanted to be part of this exceptional phenomenon, I managed," Dogheim said. One of her murals was inspired by the shortage of gas bottles, which she says added to the burden of women in particular. "Egyptian women are treated badly on all levels: societal, cultural and political. I drew a group of impoverished women wearing the veil, carrying gas bottles and suffering in silence." In Dogheim's mural the composition recalls the shape of a pyramid, her own way of saying that the women's burden is as heavy as a pyramid, and still growing.
