Since the ‘revolution’, Egyptian artists have been expressing their newfound freedoms not just in the studios but on the streets. Perhaps that's most evident on Cairo’s Mohammed Mahmoud street, not far from the epicentre of Egypt's revolutionary heart, Tahrir Square. Three years ago, the walls there were bare. Now, there's a hardly a wall left unpainted.
The square is an area that's been the site of many violent clashes. For artists like 32-year-old Ammar Abo Bakr, an art professor based in Luxor, it's important to document what happened there. “We wanted to change the image inside of this street," he tells me. "We use graffiti as a medium, or tool, to talk to the people, to tell them the real story about this street.”
And the walls serve as the canvases. Walking through Cairo, graffiti is everywhere. Political statements. Images that protest police violence and sexual harassment. A stencil on a church that reads “religion is not just a beard”. It's like an open-air museum that records Egypt's recent history.
Abo Bakr says graffiti is an art but also one that serves a broader function in today's Egypt. “We like to make the wall as a newspaper. It's our newspaper,” he explains. “It's become like a dialogue. I can paint something and another person can come and add something to continue the layers and keep up the memory of the revolution.”
The artist Ganzeer, otherwise known as Mohamad Fahmy, saw the immediate power of public art during the early days of Egypt's uprising. “It was actually on January 25th and I remember I was in Tahrir at the time. I didn't plan to do anything. I just so happened to spray paint some slogans that people were chanting,” he remembers. “I noticed that when they saw me, everybody started cheering and getting excited. I couldn't help but think about the importance of the visual. I wasn't painting anything they weren’t saying or hearing. Seeing it got them really riled up. That's when I decided we needed to do more of this.”
A long-established graphic artist, Ganzeer’s street art during the revolution gained some fame. Among Ganzeer's more famous works, are a series of murals of the martrys’ - those who lost their lives during the revolution. But now he fears that it could become too much of a good thing. “A lot of it is people scribbling on the walls,” he continues. “I’ll admit it's kind of gotten out of hand.”
For now, street art still serves a purpose. Soraya Morayef has documented Egyptian street art since the revolution on her blog, Suzee in the City. “These artists are ground breaking, because they're pushing the limits of what our conservative society is used to seeing,” says Morayef. “I think it’s a testament to the progression that society has made in some way or another.”
But while defacing public property remains illegal in Egypt, attempts to whitewash the walls just cleans the canvas for even more street art. Abo Bakr says it'll never go away. “It's become part of the revolution. Nobody can stop this. Nobody can control this.”
He says he and others will continue to publish their visual newspaper as long as he can. He even wants to open a school one day, to teach the next generation how to transform alleys into galleries.
