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Re-articulating Citizenship and History: Graffiti art as site of negotiation in Cairo's Arab Spring
Abstract
Walking through Mohammad Mahmoud Street in Cairo—the artery between Tahrir Square and the presidential palace—is like walking through the halls of a contemporary art museum. The visitor walks slowly contemplating this public and outdoor exhibition space that showcases numerous artists' graffiti and mural art. The exhibition is busy with color, overlapping works, and messages of dissent, pain, and encouragement. At times, the feeling can get overwhelming as the viewer begins to feel small amongst the vastness and complexity of layers of conversations that have taken place on these walls over the past three years. In this paper, I argue that the art on the walls of Mohammad Mahmoud Street produce alternative narratives of the Egyptian Arab Spring that make visible the experiences, contributions, and critiques of minoritarian subjects left out of dominant accounts. These walls are sites where artists negotiate their intersecting social geographies through conversations they have with the city and each other by leaving their marks on these public spaces. The works are the artists' ways of interrupting local patriarchal systems of governance, and of shifting transnational politics of race, gender, and sexuality. Researching this work is significant to understand and articulate Cairo's artists' affective forms of claiming and reforming their citizenship in a moment of social and political change. In order to unpack the arguments above, I focus on the works of two Egyptian graffiti groups, Graffiti Harimi and Women on Walls, as well as the artist Bahia Shehab. I ask: What kind of public archive are these artists creating? How does it differ from other narratives and records of the Spring? How do these artists' works gender and class the revolution? And how does their graffiti, as acts of historicizing and imagining the revolution, shape the social geography of Cairo at this moment of political transition? I historicize the artists’ work from the beginning of the Arab Spring in Egypt until today and contextualize the narratives through close-readings of the art works and relating them to events in the revolution. Finally, I theorize the work by reflecting on it through feminist theories of centering the subaltern subject and writing history from that vantage point, which reveals a process of artists' negotiating their subjectivity as citizens during a moment of transition.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies