The Global Street: The Rise of Cairene Street, 2011-2012 The use of social media to unite participants in the ongoing struggles in the Middle East has dominated the narratives of the Arab Spring. In the case of the rapid proliferation of street art in Cairo, these networks have been instrumental in the spread of what is essentially local art to a worldwide network. Street art and political graffiti were almost nonexistent prior to the uprisings of 2011. Since this time, an explosion of street art has occurred in the streets of Cairo, much of which contains an overtly political message. Planned events, such as Ganzeer’s declared “Mad Graffiti Week(s),” accompanied by Google maps of the painted murals, suggest the intentionality of the artists participating in this movement. The wide-spread, conscious documentation and digital sharing of Cairene street art has transformed this most ephemeral, and localized form of art into an eternal and global expression. Revolutionary images have spread beyond Egypt as artists abroad participate in parallel projects in solidarity with the Cairene movement. Moreover, the artists themselves often make clear references to street artists elsewhere in the Arab world and beyond. This paper investigates the nature of street art, at once local and universal, in revolutionary Egypt, and the role of revolutionary art in a digital, global age.

In the awake of the “Arab Spring,” we have seen a renewed interest in artistic production from the region, one which revolves around the relationship between art and activism and an interrogation of the role of artist during times of revolution. This paper will examine some of these questions as they pertain to the Egyptian context, by focusing on the Egyptian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. The platform honored the memory of the 32 year old multi-media artist and musician, Ahmed Basiony, who was killed by gun wounds during the violence in Tahrir square on January 28th, 2011. The exhibition, 30 Days of Running in the Space, combines both a multimedia project exhibited a year earlier and unedited video footage from the demonstrations in the days leading up to the artist’s death thus simultaneously presenting Basiony as an artist, an activist, and ultimately a martyr. Much of the work draws on the technologies that we have come to associate and celebrate as part of the “Arab Spring.” However, in this paper I suggest that the emphasis on Basiony’s martyrdom throughout the exhibition threatens to restrict our reading of his work to the tragic events leading to his untimely death. In doing so, this raises larger questions about our restrictive expectations, and perhaps dated understanding, of artistic production within the context of contemporary revolutions.

This paper focuses on the Syrian documentary film collective, Abounaddara, to trace a preliminary methodology that not only problematizes treating the art of the Syrian uprising as a ‘new’ genre, but also the thorny nature of using art to represent this uprising as an event with predetermined meaning - one that can be neatly assimilated into broader narratives of change and the ‘Arab Spring.’ As the Syrian uprising continues to unfold, few would dispute that representation – both inside and outside Syria - occupies a central and bitterly contested role in determining the meaning of political change. While a good deal of artistic production since the uprising began has taken a side in this discursive battle, my turn to Abounaddara’s films is an attempt to move away from instrumentalizing art in the service of a single narrative of the uprising and to think about how one group of filmmakers are using art to intervene in the culture of the image in Syria. As Roland Barthes has made amply clear, images ask things of us. And in Syria, from the ubiquitous presence of the ‘eternal’ dictator in Syrian public space over the past four decades to contemporary deployments of charred, mutilated bodies on Youtube, the encounter between viewer and image has been and continues to be heavily weighted toward the interpretive power of the latter. I suggest that Abounaddara’s short films, on the border between narrative and documentary, provide a systematic visual critique of this representational mode – and its implications for politics in Syria – in an effort to open up that interpretive space. While this artistic intervention into the political is well and good, to conclude I dwell on Abounaddara’s self-consciously withdrawn stance from the public sphere of protest art. This reading of Abounaddara not only runs counter to established notions of art’s role in the Arab Spring – in which viral popularity freely propels political change – but suggests that certain artists have explicitly taken their distance from this vision of art in revolution. I connect this stance back to Abounaddara’s broader project and ask how maintaining a prescribed role for art in the Syrian uprising may risk perpetuating, rather than revolutionizing, established representational modes.

Despite their vastly divergent characters and goals, the popular uprisings of the so-called “Arab Spring” of 2011 shared a number of common features, most especially the use of social and digital media as a means for mass communication and mobilization. Whether in Tahrir, Tehran, or Tripoli, demonstrators staged rallies in the streets to call for the downfall of autocratic rulers and regimes, amplifying their voices with visuals— such as large posters, banners, pamphlets, graffiti, murals, etc.—to further buttress their ideological messages. Battles were staged on the ground and in digital space through the creation of oppositional image-worlds, in which the incumbent icons of state were mocked via caricature, beast allegories, anti-Semitic coding, and other visual forms of humor falling all along the comedic spectrum, from the lighthearted spoof to the biting invective. In Libya, markedly different pictorial forms of ridicule were unleashed in the public domain. Their chief target was Muammar al-Gaddafi, the “brother leader” of the Libyan Arab Republic and the so-called “King of Kings of Africa,” the latter title bestowed upon him at a meeting of African rulers he convened in Benghazi in 2008. After failing to win support from Arab governments, Gaddafi spent great efforts campaigning for African Unity, fashioning himself as a traditional sub-Saharan chief. His bombastic African title, his Afro-like (shafshufa) hairdo, and his eye-catching robes without a doubt made him an easy target for visual satire, which turned visibly more racist when he and his son, Sayf al-Islam, turned to using mercenaries drawn from the Sudan, Chad, Niger, and Mali to violently suppress street demonstrations. Throughout the uprisings, the opposition sought to degrade Gaddafi through the use of a variety of “BlackFace” visual stereotypes, revealing that within the particular politico-cultural case of Libya, satirical contentions during the “Arab Spring” were not just transgressive and factional but instrumentally racist as well.