This paper analyzes two works of performance art from post-revolution Tunisia. Exhibiting a new medium, participatory performance art, the pieces demonstrate the need for analyses that prioritize the relationship between the social and the material, a methodology that may be useful for theorizing performance art, bodies, and public space in multiple contexts. Post-Arab Spring, Tunisians felt a new social freedom, particularly in the early days after January 14, 2011. However, while the political arena opened, major structures had not changed. There was no organized movement to supplant the ousted dictatorship. Many scholars have noted changes in art as well, that new modes of art and a freedom of artistic expression blossomed across the Middle East North Africa region in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Yet scholars have neglected performance art, which was nearly non-existent as a medium in the Tunisian art scene before the revolution In spring 2011, a group of Tunisians lead by artist Sana Tamzini propelled a white, fiberglass cloud through the narrow, winding streets of the Tunis medina, the old city center. This performance, Horr 1 (Free 1) (2011) was one of the first public art performances in the history of Tunisian art and was inspired by the recent revolution-related political sit-ins known as Kasbah I and II at that very site. Similarly, in a second performance, Sous mon drapeau (Under my flag) (2012), citizens used their bodies to create an oversize, living Tunisian flag in solidarity with a young protester, Khaoula Rachidi. Horr 1 and Sous mon drapeau do not merely memorialize post-revolution moments, they embody the Tunisian revolution by prioritizing citizen-bodies as agents of change, while indicating a new direction for Tunisian contemporary art, that of bodily, participatory works. While outwardly, the works do not seem to make claims about bodies, on another level they do just that, for without the citizen-bodies, the performances do not exist. The citizen-bodies involved in Horr 1 and Sous mon drapeau use participatory body art to reference themes of the Tunisian revolution and make new relationships with one another, illustrating how a performance can encompass more than its singular act. The emergence of public performance art as a medium in contemporary Tunisian art indicates a new relationship of Tunisian bodies to public spaces and embodies the revolution, being arguably the medium with the closest relationship to protest; both protest and performance explicitly involve the body in action.

In the wake of major events that have shaken the Middle East and North Africa since the Arab Spring, politically engaged women artists have increasingly come to characterize a key new direction in art production.Since the beginning of the Egyptian Revolution, representations of women through media, art, and even laws and constitutional articles illustrate a paradoxical standpoint. While women have been marginalized in many official and political institutions, images of women and women’s bodies have been abundant, multifaceted, and sometimes incongruous. This study focuses on Bahia Shehab, an art historian and graffiti artist from Egypt who feminized the verb ‘rebel’ and was behind the One Thousand and One ‘No’ stencils that were sprayed all over the city of Cairo during the first two years of the revolution. Two different, but at the same time complementary, aspects of defiance can be depicted in her works, and are of civic and epistemic nature: against the state’s apparatuses and ways of perceiving, representing and understanding women within a revolutionary setting.

A few days after what was called the “Dey Uprising” (the December 2017 Uprising), 31-year-old Vida Movahed, clad in black clothes with white shoes and her hair let loose, climbed an electrical power box on one of Tehran’s busiest streets, and put her white head cover on a stick and began to wave it like a peace flag. In the two weeks that followed, more than 30 young Iranian women climbed other similar pedestals, and put their headscarves on a stick to protest obligatory hijab. These events coincided with the President proclaiming that the Iranian military will no longer jail women because of their covering. Their white headscarves resembling a banner of peace, their silence a marker of non-violence, and their unadorned appearance a signal of innocence, all hint to this moment being a distinct kind of protest, one that resembles an artistic performance. While the history of Iranian feminism and women’s liberation movement dates to a hundred years ago, this moment of civil disobedience in protest to mandatory hijab has embodied a unique performative framework, one which I will be exploring in this paper. The performance is incomplete without actions and reactions from the passersby and is meant to evoke the participation of the audience (Thompson, 2012, p. 21), through physical presence, as well as virtual reflections on social media. Their awe, applause, or sarcastic remarks about the threat of incarceration is part of this performance. This act also begs the participation of the police and other security apparatuses. In other words, the ramifications of such performances in the Iranian society are what raise the stakes of this civil disobedience. This “symbolic gesture” served as an invitation to other citizens to transform this individualistic performance into a collective and social act of dissidence, for it serves as a “powerful and effective method for change” (18). Together, the audience and the statue-like figure with the waving hijab operate as “formative political intervention,” one that takes the shape of a “protest theater” with its relative spontaneity (Juris, 2014, p. 237-238). Along examining the sociopolitical aspects of this performance, I will be studying the socio-spatial and the historic performative feature of hijab on the bodies of women in the religion of Islam.