12/29/2023 0 Comments Banksy art mickey mouse gas mask![]() ![]() Ganzeer created this interactive Google map, this blog, where he enabled artists to upload images, and their location, so people like me could upload and tag them to the artist. “It reached the point where I could recognise the street, the aesthetic of the artist and figure it out. All the artists have Twitter accounts, Facebook, so it was easy to access them without invading their privacy.” By following the top Twitter accounts I would find out about work I hadn’t heard of. These artists were uploading or tweeting. “What was really great about the process was social media. I would start to credit the photographs to the separate artists, the artists would start to contact me because they recognised I enjoyed what I was doing, that there was no ulterior motive to my job.” I started getting feedback from street artists. At some point it felt like a responsibility, but not in a negative sense. ![]() With every post it went from being fun to being an obssession. “Then I noticed graffiti appearing in different neighbourhoods. I said ‘I’ll put it on a blog and you can share it with your friends.’” It was for my personal archive, I put it on Facebook and a friend said ‘can I share your album’. I thought, ‘ok, I’m the only one doing this. I wasn’t aware of other people doing it, other citizen journalists. There was always new graffiti popping up and disappearing. This was Zamalek, “where the art students were, so it made sense this should be the hunting ground. I started taking photographs every day in April, May 2011, in the neighbourhood I lived in, where there was a faculty of fine arts.” It wasn’t originally a project but a personal hobby of mine. ![]() I did it once and ended up having to explain it, it became an article. “The project happened organically,” Morayef says, “I found it impossible to post images without context. The precariousness of this art makes Morayef’s catalogue of images necessary, and it has become the visual archive of an emancipatory politics, expressions of hope for a country in which women are not violated everyday. The world has been fascinated by the explosion of graffiti in Egypt, and the walls have become signifiers for revolutionary desires, and the street a place where art makes demands of its public, everyday. The artists mentioned include Aya Tarek (“one of the pioneers of graffiti in Egypt”), Hend Kheera (“the first Egyptian graffiti artist to be profiled by Rolling Stone”), Bahia Shebab (an artist and art historian behind the project, A thousand times no), Mira Shihadeh, Laila Magued (more of her work here), the Nooneswa collective, and Hanna El Degham, whose work on the wall of the Lycee Morayef describes as “one of the most astounding street artworks I have seen in Egypt.” The article also includes images of the tributes - by artists Alaa Awad, Keizer, Zeft and Amr Nazeer, X4Spra圜ans and Ammar Abo Bakr - to Egyptian women, their role in the protests, works made in outrage at the men who have harrassed and attacked them. The same urgent questions - of graffiti and gender, intimidation and interpretation - resurface in a recent post, ‘Women in Graffiti: A Tribute to the Women of Egypt’, on the participation of women in making graffiti on the walls of Egyptian streets. Since June 2011 she has been blogging at, where she posts images of street art, with captions and analysis. Morayef is a journalist and writer based in Cairo. Eventually, after he has given her his number, he leaves, and she recommences her task, cataloguing the street art in Cairo, a city in which graffiti has flourished since 2011, but where the wall may have been white-washed the next morning. She is stuck between the wall and the man, who tells her he was in Tahrir Square (a stone’s throw away from where they are standing) every day of the uprisings, “one of the shabab of the revolution…”. ‘Yes but what is George Bush doing with Mickey Mouse? I like this picture, I walk past it every day, but I wish there’d be some writing explaining it so that I could understand.’ ‘Maybe it’s a president? It could be George Bush.’ ‘I’m not quite sure,’ I say politely, wishing I could go back to my camera, but he appears adamant for an answer. He’s bald with a graying walrus moustache, probably in his mid-forties, his full cheeks sweating as he fans at his pin-striped pink shirt. ‘Yes but what does it mean? And who is that man next to him?’ ‘I think that’s Mickey Mouse,’ I say helpfully. Soraya Morayef is taking a photo of the wall where these figures are painted, on a busy street in downtown Cairo, when a man walks up to her and asks her what the picture means. Bush, and they’re both looking perfectly happy about the whole thing. Mickey Mouse is pulling apart a bomb: inside is the torso of George W.
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