Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)

• Paint the dead within days and by name: take the martyr's face from a photograph, add wings, and paint eye patches for the protesters shot in the eye in November 2011, so the wall becomes a memorial where passers-by leave flowers.
• Recast tomb painting for the present: line up figures in profile and in procession, as mourning or marching women, in panels and registers around a central portrait panel; borrow coffin-bearers who stand for the Egyptian people and a sarcophagus, a green man for immortality, a red-eyed black panther for anger, black flowers for sorrow, papyrus-bearing women after a Ramesseum battle relief, the Book of the Dead's weighing of the heart, and winged martyrs rising to heaven; brush them in acrylic rather than spray them, and let Pharaonic, Coptic and Islamic sources share one wall.
• Answer power with sardonic caricature: split the field marshal's face with the ousted president's, turn the military council into a three-headed snake, and let a cartoon witness such as Sad Panda make the violence look absurd.
• Cut cheap stencils anyone can repeat, such as a historical lām-alif 'No' with its target, 'No SCAF' or a martyr's face, and spray short slogans across the city in Arabic and sometimes English.
• Treat every wall as a running conversation: when it is whitewashed, paint again over the ghosts of the last layer, and let tags, slogans, additions and defacements pile up as replies.
• On a barricade, paint the street back: continue the road, the trees and the sky across the concrete blocks in trompe-l'oeil, and fold the street's own violence into the view.

Cairo, from the 18-day occupation of Tahrir Square (25 January to 11 February 2011): the walls of Mohamed Mahmoud Street and the American University in Cairo, the concrete barricades put across downtown streets, and the Zamalek wall under the 6th of October Bridge. Painted by graphic artists such as Ganzeer, stencil and graffiti artists such as Sad Panda and Keizer, muralists trained at the Luxor Faculty of Fine Arts (Ammar Abo Bakr, Alaa Awad), and writers from a pre-2011 graffiti scene in Cairo and Alexandria that had learned from US writers online; Alexandria's walls carried a parallel scene

1. John Lennon, 'Assembling a Revolution: Graffiti, Cairo and the Arab Spring', Cultural Studies Review 20(1), March 2014, pp. 237–75, doi:10.5130/csr.v20i1.3203 (Tank vs. Bike and its additions, Sad Panda and Badr Team 1; the pre-2011 writing scene in Cairo and Alexandria, with Mahmoud Aly learning from cope2, can2 and online black books; Awad's Port Said mural with Abo Bakr and Hanaa El Deighem, Lennon's spelling of El Degham, showing present-day women revolutionaries in an 'ancient Egypt style', some nude in rejection of 'the Whahabi style of Islam'; Abo Bakr painting through the night after Port Said, arguing with Islamists, and 'We have nothing to do with any party or movement'; Salafists replacing martyr portraits with Qur'anic verses (note 51); layered, partly erased walls; the stencilled 'The Revolution will not be Tweeted'; Ganzeer's DIY anti-SCAF stencils; the 'No Walls' murals on Yousef al-Guindy and Sheikh Rihan streets, February–March 2012)
2. Basma Hamdy, 'Walls of Freedom: Process and Methodologies', Street Art & Urban Creativity 1(1), 2015, pp. 67–79, doi:10.25765/sauc.v1i1.19 (street art 'ranged from scrawls and scribbles to elaborately painted murals', 'Repeatedly erased and "cleaned" by the state'; Sad Panda stencil whitewashed the next morning; 400 copies confiscated in Alexandria; four graffiti artists detained in May 2015)
3. Mona Abaza, 'Walls, Segregating Downtown Cairo and the Mohammed Mahmud Street Graffiti', Theory, Culture & Society 30(1), 2013, pp. 122–39, doi:10.1177/0263276412460062 (abstract: concrete buffer walls, 'sardonic graffiti and epic murals', a memorial space)
4. Wikipedia: 'Mohamed Mahmoud graffiti' (the article carries a close-connection banner; used for Lost Eyes, Mothers of the Martyrs, the Tantawi–Mubarak face by Mohamed Fathi, Awad's Funeral with its sarcophagus, the Ultras Ahlawy faces and angel-winged martyrs, and Marching Women, the three-headed snake, the 'No Wall' initiative and the September 2012 whitewashing), 'Ganzeer', 'Ammar Abo Bakr' (Luxor training, 'We used walls as a newspaper', the No Walls campaign), 'Alaa Awad' (neo-Pharaonic style, brush and acrylic rather than stencil and spray, Marching Women after the Ramesseum's first pylon with papyrus in the women's hands), 'Bahia Shehab' (A Thousand Times No and its slogans)
5. University of Warwick and AHRC, Politics, Popular Culture and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution (egyptrevolution2011.ac.uk): items 'Eye patches' (258), 'Tank versus Bike' (58), 'Glory to the Unidentified' (79: Ammar Abo Bakr, 1 November 2013, Sayed Khaled with angel wings, 'the youngest martyr of the revolution'), 'Walls of Freedom' (243) and 'Revolution Graffiti: Street Art of the New Egypt' (233)
6. Abdel-Rahman Hussein, 'Blog: Martyrs and mourning on Mohamed Mahmoud', Egypt Independent, 7 March 2012 (the street murals by Ammar Abu Bakr, Alaa Awad, Hana al-Deghem and Mohamed Khaled; Abu Bakr's central 'Glory to the martyrs' panel ringed by Awad's Pharaonic scenes of burial and mourning; coffin-bearers as the Egyptian people, the green man for immortality, the red-eyed black panther for anger and black flowers for sorrow; the split-face Tantawi and Mubarak at the Qasr al-Aini corner by Omar Fathy)
7. Jadaliyya, 'The Dramaturgy of A Street Corner' (25 January 2013, photographs by Mona Abaza) (the half-Mubarak portraits by rabitat fanani al-thawrah at the Tahrir corner of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, repainted at the same size, with Amr Moussa and Ahmed Shafiq added and a smaller September 2012 repaint with Mohamed Badie)
8. Soraya Morayef (Suzee in the City), 'On Codes and Translation: Understanding Alaa Awad' (25 November 2015) (Awad's use of the Book of the Dead's weighing of the heart; his mourning women, painted after the Port Said massacre of February 2012 the same size as the gods and kings in other murals on Mohamed Mahmoud Street)
9. Angela Boskovitch, 'Photo Essay: Qasr el-Nil Mural: A Dialogue of Form and Topic', Sada, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 30 September 2013 (Sameh Ismael's calligraphy of Ahmed Aboul Hassan's poetry, painted on the nights of 27 and 28 June before the 30 June demonstrations)
10. Tarek Radwan, 'Coopting Mohamed Mahmoud', MENASource, Atlantic Council, 18 November 2013 (the interim government's martyrs' memorial in Tahrir, vandalised by revolutionary groups, and the Brotherhood's counterclaims to remembering the revolution's victims)
11. Jadaliyya, 'New Texts Out Now: Don Karl and Basma Hamdy, Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution' (25 March 2015), with excerpts by Ahdaf Soueif, Rana Jarbou, Caram Kapp and Basma Hamdy
12. TED: Bahia Shehab, 'A thousand times no', TEDGlobal 2012 (June 2012)
13. Don Karl and Basma Hamdy (eds.), Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution (Berlin: From Here to Fame, 2014); Mia Gröndahl, Revolution Graffiti: Street Art of the New Egypt (Cairo: AUC Press, 2012; London: Thames & Hudson, 2013)
14. Bahia Shehab, Unified multiplicities: Arabic letters between modernity, identity, and abstraction (PhD thesis, Leiden University, 2019) (her research on letterist abstraction, behind the hurufiyya influence)

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