They build walls, she paints them

​

 Based on the interview with Bahia Shehab, 21/02/2020

​

During the Revolution in Egypt in January 2011, protests led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak and in the aftermath came an outburst of artistic expression and street art bloomed in Cairo. The presidential cabinet was taken up by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which caused another wave of protests. While protesters chanted slogans, graffiti artists sprayed their silent voices on temporary concrete walls. These were erected on the streets leading to the Ministry of Defence in order to protect it from the masses. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

One artist, Bahia Shehab, sprayed a series of stencilled images on concrete walls of Cairo. She took to the streets in a similar way to how a cave dweller took to the caves thousands of years ago to execute blow paintings. Prehistoric artists, however, used the hand and animal skins as stencils instead of paper and ground rock pigments instead of can sprays. The images Shehab created were screaming: ‘No to military rule’, ‘No to a new pharaoh’, ‘No to blinding heroes’, ‘No to barrier walls’ where the calligraffiti in a form of the sole of the military boot reads: ‘Long live a peaceful revolution’. Each ‘No’ was referring to a real-life incident. A stencil, a negative, was sprayed with a can to create an image, a positive. This reversal articulates the artist’s hope for change she envisioned.

​

The Blue Bra stencil recalls an infamous case of police brutality towards a lady who was half stripped of her abaya which revealed a blue bra underneath. She lost consciousness after the policeman stepped on her chest multiple times with his black military boots. Shehab's  message 'No to stripping the people’ is particularly poignant.

 

 

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Bahia is a graphic design and Islamic Art History academic at the American University in Cairo. As an artist, she is investigating how art can become a conversation starter and a tool for peaceful social change that preserves cultural identity. She was the first Arab woman to receive the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab culture for an installation titled ‘No, A Thousand Times No’. This piece was produced for the exhibition ‘The Future of Tradition - the Tradition of Future’ at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2010. This installation illustrated a common Arabic phrase ‘No, and a thousand times no’ that is used to express total refusal. The curtain of plexiglass segments, each with a black letter لا (‘la’ for ‘no’), was a meeting ground for a thousand Nos from various historical Arabic calligraphies from Islamic art archives spanning 1400 years of evolution of perfection. Through the installation Bahia denies all the stereotypes imposed upon the Arab world. Ultimately, she refuses to be an imitator or follower of the West while also refusing the regressive interpretation of Arab heritage. With the ongoing loss of cultural heritage comes the loss of memory and ultimately of identity. In an interview Bahia states: ‘It is a disaster when you forget who you are…how can you move forward if you don't know where you came from?’. The modes of the West have been adopted first through colonisation and later globalisation. Bahia asks, ‘Have we reached any humane solutions?… Every time we tried - we hit a wall…whether, in poetry, art…we hit a wall’.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

Nine months after the first wave of protests Bahia stopped being an online activist and took her ‘No’ to the street. No became a concrete politically charged statement that hit a real wall in urban space. Temporary concrete walls made of piled up cubes were erected to keep protesters out. That is when the No idea migrated from smooth transparent plexiglass to the rough walls on the streets of Cairo and became an ‘ammunition’ of protestors. For such strong messages the artist used 3 strong colours: black, red and white. Between 3 am and 5 am she would go down to the street to spray an entire wall as fast as she could to avoid interacting with people and to lower the chances of getting caught. Spraying was an illegal endeavour aimed at message impact rather than aesthetic image-making. She took to the streets and used a spray can as her voice so she as an artist can ‘reach people directly’. Bahia vividly recalls, ‘It felt so liberating, as if I was actually screaming’.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

In being a canvas for the artist, the wall also became an arena for a silent conversation between citizens with different political views. As a result of the ‘There are no walls’ campaign in January 2013 the temporary wall, that was covered with No stencils, got painted over with perspectival images of the street without political proclamations. Bahia’s later response to it was to spray a dialogue of 8 children figures playing ‘hide and seek’. The first one says ‘Did you hide?’, the other replies ‘Not yet’; ‘Has the revolution succeeded?’, the reply is ‘Not yet’; ‘Has Egypt become heaven on earth?’ - ‘Not yet’.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Four factions were battling on a canvas of cement. The protesters were being graffitied by opponents who saw them as rebels. All of their efforts were covered either by ‘good doers’ who were cleaning the city, or by government that would cover only graffiti and leave the rest of the wall as it was. The tenants were in opposition to all the others - they did not wish their walls being used for political slogans. Street art was an ongoing ephemeral conversation until all the walls were whitewashed. Although the artist does not reflect political views of Egyptian society, she believes she does share the same hopes for the country. ‘Society is not driven by pragmatic people, it is driven by dreamers’. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

​

​

​

 

 

Bibliography 

​

Bahia Shehab, At the Corner of a Dream: A Journey of Resistance and Revolution: The Street Art of Bahia Shehab, (Gingko Library, 2020).

​

Bahia, Shehab, Verbal Interview, conducted by Katrina Khvesenya, 21 February 2020.

​

Nancy Miller, Jason Tougaw, Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, (University of Illinois Press, 2002).

​

Nama Khalil,"Blue Bra Graffiti", MoMA Online Archive, 2014, https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/blue-bra-graffiti-bahia-shehab/ [accessed 5.03.2020].