Iconography in the Tahrir Movement (original) (raw)
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Street Arts of Resistance in Tahrir and Gezi
Middle Eastern Studies
With the tremendous visibility of popular mobilization in the last decade, scholars have increasingly directed their attention to the streets to examine the dynamics of power and resistance. Among emerging venues of politics, this study examines street art and graffiti as a performance of resistance in the 2011 Tahrir Revolution and 2013 Gezi Protests in Egypt and Turkey, respectively. As re-appropriation of the urban landscape and modes of self-expression, street art and graffiti lie at the intersection of politics, space, and identity. Inspired by James C. Scott's concept of ‘arts of resistance’, this study takes up these ‘street arts of resistance’ as revealing the hidden transcript, namely, the self-disclosure of subordinates under the politics of disguise. While unpacking that subversive power, this study rests on its claim that street art and graffiti not only seek to represent, but also to perform and interject. Thereafter, it examines how these modes of visual culture interrupt time, space, and the self, along with their respective effects.
Symbol and Tahrir Square: The Struggle for Revolutionary Legitimacy
The Tahrir Documents project is unique in its approach to the collection and archiving of physical documents from the January 25 th Revolution. Where many have addressed the role of social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook in the revolutionaries' organizing tactics, our archive operates on different assumptions regarding body and space. My focus today begins with physicality-the actual presence of bodies in a space. Using sources from the archive, we can follow the development of the legitimating force of being in a particular space into a revolutionary symbol, christened with the memories of those the revolutionaries called martyrs. This paper explores the operations involved in the creation of symbol within the Maydān [Square]. These efforts, which we can trace in the revolutionary literature of Tahrir, opened up the Square's meaning to redefinition, reformulation, and co-optation by counterrevolutionary forces. In the collection of essays Translating Egypt's Revolution: the Language of Tahrir, Samia Mehrez considers the experience of Tahrir Square to be parallel to that of the mawlid-a folk festival celebrating the birth of the Prophet, or other important religious and/or cultural figures. She and her co-author write, "The mulid, like Bakhtin's description of the carnival, represents a moment of utopian freedom, the brevity of which increases its fantastic and subversive nature." i Mehrez focuses on the productive aspects of the carnivalesque scene in Tahrir, where barriers of social class and gender fell away to create a re-signified community,
The Social Role of Graffiti of Protesters of
International Journal of Innovation, Creativity and Change. www.ijicc.net, 2020
In Liberation Square in the center of Baghdad, in the Liberation Square tunnel, various thematic drawings documenting the 2019 Revolution of Iraq simulate drawings and writings of sentences in Arabic and English for the production of Iraqi-featured Graffiti art. These drawings are found in all the Arab revolutions in contemporary history, the letters of the walls in the hands of the protesters, and when art becomes the weapon of change in revolutions and peaceful demonstrations, in close proximity to the Monument of Freedom embodied these youth drawings that provoke controversy through their artistic expressions, some of which seem to mimic the symbols of modern Iraqi art embodied by the work of Jawad Salim in the Monument of Freedom, to bear many colors, images and contemporary symbols in formulations that defy reality. Problem of the Study Our world is witnessing transitional transformations that produce creative art and expression that brings about political and social transformations, which qualifies rich opportunities for social and political change by rereading the visual discourse manifested in drawings and writings on the walls of squares in our Arab societies through a socio-cultural reading of various activities with social and political challenges to create a different image of societal reality. Throughout history, a large segment of the generation of educated artists has been subjected to repression at some point in their lives through arrest or exile, as their works posed a threat to the political system, and therefore their works of art were a catalyst for controversy and critical thinking, and what we are witnessing today in the drawings of Liberation Square is a lot of social concepts and from this point on, the problem of research can be limited to the following question: What is the social role of the caravan paintings of the protesters of the 2019 revolution in Iraq? Study Significance The importance of research lies in the following things: first, there is a need to document such drawings because of their expressive aspects that reflect on the recipient symbols and visions that have social connections. Second: To confirm the impact of the artwork, especially the cultural aspect and its implications for the social and political level of our societies. Third: The study benefits researchers in the fields of art. Fourth: The research reveals the role of drawings through the artistic expression of what is the relationship between youth and their homeland. Fifth: Drawings in revolutions have become the main pillars of achieving goals, linked to the lives of individuals in their communities. From these points of view, this research is an attempt to contribute to achieving a conviction of the importance of art and activating its role. Aims of the Study The current research aims to: identify the social role of the caravan paintings of the protesters of the 2019 revolution in Iraq. Study Limitations The research is determined by examining the social role of protesters' drawings of the October 2019 Revolution in the Liberation Square tunnel.
Signs of the Times: The Popular Literature of Tahrir
This issue of Shahadat (an online publication focusing on short-form creative writing in the Middle East and its diasporas) takes as its focus the popular literature of the Egyptian Revolution. Drawing on protest signs, graffiti, and street art in Tahrir to read the culture of resistance particular to the Egyptian Revolution, the curators examine how protesters changed the political narrative through the use of images, memorials, and expressions of daily life. Featuring examples from an extensive gallery of online images culled from the collections of several prominent Egyptian journalists and activists, the online piece is a visual tour of some of the creative production of Egypt's Revolution. A collaborative curation project split between New York City and Cairo, it is ArteEast's first critical look at the cultural production related to recent political developments in the Middle East.
Tahrir Square as Spectacle: Some Exploratory Remarks on Place, Body and Power 1
mohamed samir el-khatib This article treats the Egyptian 25 January revolution as a struggle over the right to produce signs within an Egyptian cultural landscape long plagued by the state's attempted monopoly over meaning. Like an actor onstage who acquires a new sense of agency through performance, the individual citizen in revolt performs an existential act aiming to reclaim the uninhibited, free body from the regime and its cognitive hold. The revolution thus lends itself to analysis via the tools of theatre and performance studies. This theatrical mode of knowledge can be achieved in at least two strategic ways. First, by regarding the revolution as a battle between two distinct powers, each deploying its own discursive and cognitive weaponry-the revolution, qua conflict of wills, can be analysed as an event with discernible dramatic dimensions. Second, by viewing the revolution which took place in a specific time and place as a theatrical event capable of transforming mundane bodies into creative ones, while also reconfiguring place into a theatrical space and thereby subverting oppressive state power.
Street Art and the Arab Spring: The Passage from Revolution to Institution
In few decades, street art has succeeded in migrating from the hidden undergrounds to the open streets. Shortly after the Arab uprisings in 2011, street art has proliferated in almost all the Arab countries. Each country used it for its own purpose, producing works of art that are unique to the place where they were produced. This article traces the evolution of street art during and after the Arab Spring. Drawing from social theory, it discusses the context that catalysed the emergence of some Arab street art experiences and the dynamics that interplayed, strongly marking the artistic scene during and after the Arab Spring. The article is a prelude to further research conducted on the street art scene in the MENA region.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020
This article examines the grassroots artistic initiative al-Fann Midan (Art is a City Square) in Cairo and a contrasting approach to street art organizing in Alexandria to demonstrate how each enacted a different relationship to 'the political' in a revolutionary moment. Extending sociologist Asef Bayat's concept 'quiet encroachment', it analyzes these contrasting approaches through the sonic metaphor of 'loud' and 'quiet' politics. As a spectrum, this framework highlights how the everyday, the gestural, and the affective on the one hand can exist simultaneously, and at times in tension with, larger, more representational political expressions on the other. It thus avoids fetishizing creative 'resistance' or 'dissent', while nonetheless analyzing art in a revolutionary moment, by grounding creative expression more historically and with analytical attention to how it reanimates long-standing debates among Arab intellectuals regarding the role of the 'artist'.
The Geosemiotics of Tahrir Square: A study of the relationship between discourse and space
Journal of Language and Politics, 2014
The year 2011 saw unprecedented waves of people occupying key locations around the world in a statement of public discontent. In Egypt, the protests which took place between 25 January and 11 February 2011 culminating in the ouster of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak have now come to be known as the Egyptian Revolution. Media reporting of the revolution often portrayed it as a ‘spectacle’ playing out on the stage of Tahrir Square which was dubbed ‘the symbolic heart of the Egyptian revolution’. Tahrir Square quickly became a space serving various functions and layered with an array of meanings. This paper explores the relationship between the discourse of protest messages and the space of Tahrir Square during the January 25 revolution, demonstrating how the two were mutually reinforcing. The messages are drawn from a corpus of approximately 2000 protest messages captured in Tahrir Square between 25 January and 11 February 2011. The analysis is presented in the form of six conceptualising frames for the space of Tahrir Square which take into account both its geographical and social context. The conceptualisation draws from the field of geosemiotics, which posits that all discourses are ‘situated’ both in space and time (Scollon & Scollon 2003), and on the Lefebvrian principles of the production of space which provide a useful framework for interpreting urban space (Lefebvre 1991).