Gamal Nkrumah is intrigued by Ganzeer who assembles establishment and street art in a provocative bravura display -- cat and canary, upstairs downstairs It is a provocative celebration of street art's essential materiality that motley visual kaleidoscopic stimuli are gathered under one roof. Graffiti and street art do not travel easily, even within the same city, from suburb to another let alone be nestled in an island. "I yearned to kickoff the season with an authentic Egyptian spirit that translates easily into an international language," Mona Said, director of SafarKhan Gallery Zamalek, told Al-Ahram Weekly. Ganzeer, the pseudonym picked by artist Mohamed Fahmy, fulfilled her promise. The outcome of SafarKhan's collaboration with Ganzeer was something quite new to our eyes. "The Virus is spreading" carried all the accoutrements of a velvet revolution, including a gas mask, an AK-47 a person of indeterminate sex sporting an "Afro hair-do. A pitiful street cat foraging in a rubbish dump. Street art, a virus, had achieved a position of unconditional trust within the revolutionary activist circles that roamed the vicinity of Tahrir Square. "The virus can be used as an analogy to anything that shakes The Establishment. Any establishment -- be it the Political Establishment, the Social Establishment, the Cultural Establishment, the Religious Establishment or the Art Establishment," Ganzeer extrapolated. Mask is a recurrent theme replete with revolutionary symbolism. It occurred to me that "mask" is a four-letter word that should be uttered with great deliberation and after long reflection in post-revolutionary Egypt. Ganzeer, detained in 26 May 2011 for distributing stickers he designed depicting the "Mask of Freedom" -- a daring creation of the activist artist. "There will always be a small opposition at work that the Establishment isn't too happy with," he expounded. The seasons are turning. "This viral analogy cannot be more obvious than in the case of Egypt's current post-revolutionary climate," Ganzeer interjected. Tahrir is ablaze once again. "The methods of containing a virus vary. Typically, the Establishment will first look into crushing any opposition," Ganzeer muses. "Within political contexts, this could be the use of violent force. Within the religious establishment this could be expiation. And, within the artistic context, this can be done via belittlement," he elucidated. The human form is present, too. Resonating with the post-25 January Revolution existential uncertainty, Ganzeer's works opened the way both to futuristic underpinnings -- the miraculous "Masks of Freedom" to the sublime albeit abstracted cat with a broken wrist and plaster patches on its paws and coquettish bandages defying the very dynamism of the Revolution. The cat in question is also a euphemism for the downtrodden Egyptian masses. This was no Persian pussy and I was bemused by Ganzeer's saucy Parthian shot with his brushstrokes. Shooting the feline and the feminine in the foot, the cat that stares the onlooker in the eye is a euphemism for the women of the revolution. Cats, of course, are carnivores. Women are mainly omnivorous, even though most women do have a tendency to consume less animal flesh than men do. Even so, Egyptian women more so than most women elsewhere seem to be underrepresented in the upper echelons of political power. The cat's injuries are akin to a wound that never ceases to seep and throb. But there is no sanguine fluid, no evidence of menses or blood of any description even though the onlooker instinctively knows that the cat in question is as fem as they come. The crimson cat sits astride the canary wall in a gravity-defying pose. The feline creature is a stunning stunt in which medium and form deliver meaning. The onus, obviously, is on defiance. The upper floor is the niche of the establishment. There are no rifle butts, no explosives but the entire show is combustible in more ways than one. The strokes are uneven, but the overall impression is steady. Ganzeer's eponymous art studio was SafarKhan Gallery itself. It had become his virtual abode since 7 September and promises to even outdo his celebrated first solo show, Everyday Heroes, at Townhouse Gallery, Downtown Cairo, in 2007. This is not street art though billed as such. Ganzeer's exhibition is an expression of revolutionary psychosis painted from the point of view of someone who feels deeply about what is going on in Egypt at the moment. By watching the artist's street art is a bit like Freudian psychotherapy. The themes he dwells on are invariably civic responsibility and social justice. The hegemonic colour is canary yellow. Splashes of red and pink accentuate the sense of pressure around the saffron. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) is the very personification of evil in Ganzeer's book. His "Freedom Masks" were accompanied by captions that read "Greetings from the Supreme Council to the free youth of the nation". The Revolution casts its magic spell. Efforts by the authorities to remove Ganzeer's "Martyr Murals" from public buildings led to the "Mad Graffiti Weekend" of protest action by artists and their admirers. Ganzeer was the mastermind behind the May 2011 "Mad Graffiti Weekend" and he insists that he will continue to advocate what he terms "viral artwork". He has divided SafarKhan clearly into two sections, upstairs and downstairs. Upstairs stands for the Establishment and downstairs for the counterculture. Upstairs is more conventional and conservative, downstairs is chaotic, nay mayhem. Anti-military graffiti is everywhere. "This viral analogy cannot be more obvious than in the case of Egypt's current post-revolutionary climate. Indeed, we are in an obvious phase of pretend-adoption, void of any traces of true change. But just enough of a pretense to put revolutionary fervour to sleep," he observes. Remember the Martyr Murals? And, what of the "mannequin's torso with head sheathed in a gas mask"? That these questions are slippery is in no doubt. The human form lies at the heart of Ganzeer's exhibition -- cats apart. It is unlikely that so many revolutionary figures will again be gathered under one roof. Street art does not travel that easily. And, it is impressive that Ganzeer's unconventional street art with its monumental scale is represented at SafarKhan by the comic-heroic. Street art, at any rate, offers artists unique creative scope. Awkwardness noted, nevertheless, medium and form like as ever in impressive art deliver meaning and substance. The compositional boldness of Ganzeer's artistry is eye-catching. It hints of rebelliousness. Yet, it exudes connotations of seriousness. And, pride in this particular contemporary Egyptian epoch. What Ganzeer is getting at is the power of the revolutionary virus. He is documenting the process of change. Ganzeer's work is a provocative celebration of an innate materiality. It is anything but picturesque. Still, he has the gift of making his subject matter to the onlooker. The swerve is tricky to accomplish. The turbulent journey from dictatorship to democracy is never easy. And, Ganzeer instinctively understands this tenet of the revolutionary period. His work is similar to those of the more eminent Egyptian artists who have depicted various aspects of the 25 January Revolution, though on a less aggrandising scale. Ganzeer disclaims to be dubbed as a "street artist" and is not entirely comfortable with the notion of graffiti. "I don't think in terms of street art," Ganzeer insists. "In the Arab world there is something vaguely derogatory about the term graffiti," Ganzeer chortles. There was genuine pleasure in that laugh. The sense of bonhomie is palpable, and rather surprisingly the sense of rage is not. You get the feeling that Ganzeer needs to laugh at things. At the beginning of the season, there is only one way to serve the public Mona Said reckons. She resolved to introduce radical change in the form of Ganzeer. And, he readily obliged. "For the virus to truly prevail it must infect vital ranks within the establishment. Take for example the Free Officers. They recruited Major General Mohamed Naguib for their 1952 military coup. Or, take Constantine's conversion to Christianity. Or, Pablo Picasso's adoption of cubism and collage techniques," Ganzeer pointed out. Spontaneity is the art of uncalculating impulsiveness. Repository of a certain historical epoch, Ganzeer is aware that his work is transient. Yet, what is crucial to him is that he is part of the process of revolutionary change. "I see some signs of conversion within the Egyptian establishment. Be it social, political, cultural or artistic. Which is why I have faith that the virus is spreading. And, there is no stopping it," Ganzeer concludes. And, it is clearly time for me to push off. Ganzeer has to paint all night long. This, after all, is a work in progress and I will describe in awfully mushy detail what the final kitsch story will be. Alas, the concluding story plops to us on 1 November.
