The Role of Visual Arts in the Arab Spring Revolutions
Fine art Revolution Blooms After Arab Jump
From The "Creative Dissent" Exhibit
In the U.S., graffiti is often condemned as vandalism. But during the Arab Spring, artists say metropolis walls were oftentimes the merely places where they could talk dorsum to tyrants.
Street fine art can exist found beyond the Middle East and N Africa, and the Arab Leap protests inspired an artistic revolution. The "Artistic Dissent" exhibit at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan is putting that art on display.
Tell Me More invitee host Celeste Headlee spoke to guest curator Christiane Gruber, an Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Visual Culture at the University of Michigan, and Nazeer, an Egyptian street artist featured in the show.
Interview Highlights
Facing government brutality...with a smile
Nazeer: There were lots of people being shot by the Egyptian police. My good friend said, they built these walls, and they keep killing people. But we're and then used to being killed here, information technology became something that doesn't strike a lot of people anymore. So information technology's something normal that we have to alive with and information technology's part of the struggle. And he said, OK, we will exist consistent and we will be happy about information technology, because the revolution will win in the finish. And then let'due south do a huge smiley face on the wall that they built.
Defying tyranny – and death – through fine art
Gruber: Creating satirical lampoons of [former Libyan dictator Moammar] Gadhafi had serious consequences. For example, Kais al-Hilali is a famous Libyan political cartoonist who created murals likewise in Bengazi. And he was gunned down and killed by pro-regime militias earlier on. We meet that fourth dimension and over again, we meet rappers and musicians killed. Nosotros see cartoonists whose easily have been cleaved. Then being a street creative person, similar Nazeer, and being highly disquisitional of the government will take consequence.
No constabulary will stop them
Nazeer: We always hear nigh lots of laws being put in Arab republic of egypt. For example, when they set curfews or something we don't really listen because that's how information technology is. We're working against them. When they upshot a police, the Minister of Development says people will be in prison house for four years and pay $100,000 in fines [for graffiti], nosotros don't heed to something like that considering nosotros will continue doing what nosotros do. And regardless of what they say we will continue to practice the things that nosotros feel similar doing.
Finding humor despite the violence
Gruber: What I notice really inspiring about all of this, and Nazeer described information technology through his happy face, is that even in the most violent of situations you run across cultural entrepreneurs, you encounter artists, once more and once more using humor in their artwork. I run across that the humor is a kind of release of tension. It's poking fun in a sense. Information technology'south a killer joke, if it's more than malicious. But nosotros see a lot of wit and satire being used to mock incumbent power and that shows to me the level of inventiveness and intelligence of the younger street artists that are out at that place practicing and putting themselves in harm's mode.
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Source: https://www.npr.org/2013/11/07/243720260/arab-spring-artists-paint-the-town-rebel
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