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1. How do texts adhere to and deviate from conventions associated with literary forms or text types?

2. How do conventions and systems of reference evolve over time?

3. In what ways can diverse texts share points of similarity?

4. How valid is the notion of a 'classic' text?

5. How can texts offer multiple perspectives of a single issue, topic or theme?

6. In what ways can comparison and interpretation be transformative?

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Students will practice thinking critically, creatively, and deeply

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Identity: agency, voice, character, narrator, reader, author
Culture: values, beliefs, stereotype, attitudes, power, place, time
Transformation: connections, change, borrowing, building, performance

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Internal & external freedom
Crime, criminal, and punishment
Protest & revolution
Beauty, creativity, joy

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Can we–hampered by our Western vision–appreciate the inherent beauty of a culture so different from our own, or does our perception of the wrongness of human oppression blind us to this?

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This novella reads like a crime narrative...until you realize the author is leading the reader to hate the protagonist. Mahfouz uses existentialist thought as a tool for criticism, seemingly anticipating how Egypt would approach the coming decades.

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Short Film about 2013 Principal Prince Claus Laureate Ahmed Fouad Negm

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Documentary following the Egyptian Revolution from 2011-2013

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This podcast produced at San Quentin State Prison explores the global issues in this unit from a different angle: the American criminal justice system. Though it offers a perhaps more literal interpretation, it also brings up the same existentialist threads of the other texts -- perfect for exploring Intertextuality.
"Ear Hustle brings you the daily realities of life inside prison, shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration."

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Excerpts from Sartre's Being and Nothingness will give us a framework for discussion, particularly surrounding the concept of agency/choice, and will help us dive deeper into Mahfouz's relationship with his readers.

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We will examine the way street art played a role in the revolution, as well as how it functions more broadly.
- How is graffiti similar to/different from more classic or conventional art forms?
- How does street art explore similar themes as other texts, such as poetry, news stories, or documentaries?
- How has street art around Tahrir Square evolved to reflect the times?

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More than two years after protesters toppled Hosni Mubarak, Cairo is still ablaze with fiery visual reminders of Egypt's revolution. On the edge of Tahrir Square - the nerve centre of dissent - the burned-out tower block that once housed the headquarters of Mubarak's National Democratic Party stands blackened and empty. It forms a jarring juxtaposition with the coral-pink walls of the Egyptian Museum, the dusty storehouse of the country's most precious antiquities, next door.

Around the corner, there is a different kind of monument to the revolution. Mohamed Mahmoud Street - which intersects with Tahrir Square from the east - is as colourful and vibrant as the sombre hulk of the NDP building is charred. Almost every square centimetre of the walls that flank the street has been covered with bright, cacophonous paint. These murals are some of the best examples of the inimitable street art movement that has flourished since the protests against Mubarak began.

"There was very little street art in Egypt before the revolution," says Mia Gröndahl, a writer and photographer who has lived in Cairo since 2001, and whose book Revolution Graffiti: Street Art of the New Egypt was published in the UK last month. "So few pieces, in fact, that people weren't aware of it. But Egypt had the artists waiting to come out of the closet and express themselves honestly and politically."

Most of these artists were forged in the fire of the 18-day demonstrations against Mubarak in early 2011, when at least 846 people were killed. Emboldened by the ferocity of the protesters, several artists started painting slogans and murals commenting upon the tumultuous events that were convulsing their country. While other young protesters hurled bricks, Egypt's fledgling street artists picked up paintbrushes and spray cans. "By the summer of 2011," Gröndahl writes in her book, "people [had] started to talk about the walls of Egypt being under an 'art attack'."
Mad graffiti weekend
Two years ago this month, during a collaborative event known as the "Mad Graffiti Weekend", Ganzeer, a graphic designer, created an unforgettable stencilled mural of a large tank aiming its cannon at a boy on a bicycle who is balancing a tray of bread upon his head. Over time, the mural was added to, retouched, painted over and defaced, in response to events such as the "Maspero Massacre" of October 2011, when security forces and the army killed more than 25 Egyptian Copts who were peacefully protesting about the destruction of a church.

One memorable character to appear on the wall - a pot-bellied panda bear with drooping shoulders and a melancholy expression - has disappeared beneath subsequent layers of paint. Despite this, though, the Sad Panda, a resigned witness to ongoing mayhem that has since appeared on various walls around Cairo, has become one of the most recognisable visual motifs in the country's new lexicon of street art. His negative body language offers a kind of pacifist rebuke to the violence and uncertainty that have engulfed Egypt since 2011.

"People in Egypt love street art," Gröndahl tells me. "There is an old heritage of expressing yourself in images here, so they are no strangers to it. It has become an integrated part of the continuous struggle for freedom. The graffiti reminds people that the revolution isn't over yet."

Revolution Graffiti documents the urgency and self-confidence of contemporary Egyptian street art. Most of the images reproduced in the book make the work of celebrated British graffiti artists such as Banksy appear insipid by comparison. Street art, by definition, should be by the people, for the people: in Egypt it has proved a strident yet eloquent instrument of protest.

As I drove down Mohamed Mahmoud Street last week, one composition in particular caught my attention. It presents a life-size figure in profile in the guise of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, striding forcefully forwards from left to right, his skin coloured an unnatural turquoise. One arm is raised aloft, brandishing a crook or mace to smite a group of kneeling, bearded figures that cower naked before him.

It is a scene straight out of Egyptian art history. In the entrance hall of the Egyptian Museum, for instance, you will find the Narmer Palette, one of the oldest artefacts associated with a unified Egypt. Created around 3000 BC, the palette is decorated on one side with an image of a king in profile holding aloft a mace with which he is about to strike the enemy slumped at his feet.

The craftsman who skilfully carved the palette out of obdurate greenish-black rock is anonymous, but the artist who painted the mural on Mohamed Mahmoud Street has a name: Alaa Awad. Awad is a prominent member of the new generation of Egyptian street artists whose work during and since the revolution has captured international attention.
Ancient treasures
Awad, whose political message is not as immediately obvious as that of some of his more punchy peers, is my favourite street artist. Recently, I met Awad over sweet tea flavoured with mint in a café in his hometown of Luxor, where he teaches painting. Awad creates impressive murals, which take anything between six hours and one week to make, in the streets of Luxor as well as Cairo. He works with a brush and acrylic paints, rather than stencils and a spray can, and produces complex, phantasmagorical compositions that fuse the appearance of Cubist paintings by Picasso with the imagery of the ancient Egyptians. "I don't care about the police catching me," he tells me. "I just go out to paint something for people in the street. I have to share my painting now. I can't keep it."

How does he feel about Egypt's future under the presidency of the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi? "I am really worried about the politics and the future of Egypt," he says. "I don't see any change in Egypt's politics, inside or outside. I just see that the Muslim Brotherhood has captured the government. They want to change everything according to their own style, to make everything Muslim Brotherhood. They forget to improve things for the public. They have forgotten the people."

Awad's mural of a pharaoh smiting enemies on Mohamed Mahmoud Street isn't his only painting inspired by Egypt's past. In several other works, groups of beautiful, crying women mourn the deaths of ordinary people or "martyrs" killed during the revolution. This is a motif borrowed directly from the decorated walls of tombs of high-ranking officials in ancient Egypt. Why is he so interested in the art history of his country?

"I am proud about it," he says. "When I was young, I saw pictures of Tutankhamun, Nefertari and Nefertiti. They were like treasures for me. Ancient Egypt was a big civilisation. I must make people remember this culture, this history - because we can lose it. And we can't know our future if we forget our past."

As street art, Awad's murals aren't to everyone's taste. "It takes a while to understand what Alaa wants to tell us," says Gröndahl, "and in that sense his street art might not be so effective. Street art is more about getting the message out, for people to quickly understand what's on your mind. But as an artist, his art is intriguing. I'm a fan of his expressive and colourful scenes."

For my money, Awad's work is Egyptian street art at its best: distinctive, original and nuanced. His murals blend a sense of darkness, violence and despair with moments of tenderness and elation. They are full of strange, hybrid creatures, such as the beast with a bearded man's head emerging from its maw cantering beneath the legs of the pharaoh on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which seem dredged straight from the unconscious of the nation.

Perhaps, then, we should stop thinking of Awad and his colleagues as "street artists", and start calling them simply "artists" instead.
Revolution Graffiti: Street Art of the New Egypt by Mia Gröndahl is published by Thames & Hudson Alastair Sooke is an art critic for The Daily Telegraph
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

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Egypt's powerful street art packs a punch

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More than two years after protesters toppled Hosni Mubarak, Cairo is still ablaze with fiery visual reminders of Egypt's revolution. On the edge of Tahrir Square - the nerve centre of dissent - the burned-out tower block that once housed the headquarters of Mubarak's National Democratic Party stands blackened and empty.

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- In this unit, students will practice close reading skills using a variety of genres, developing skills they will need for Paper 1.
- These texts are rich with possibilities for further exploration through the HL Essay, which we will introduce during this unit.
- There are strong links between this unit and our other works (particularly the issue of internal & external freedom in Beloved, and protest in the poetry of Sipho Sepamla)

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Learning Engagements & Learner Portfolio Activity Ideas

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Learning Engagements & Learner Portfolio Activity Ideas

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-Journal responses to each piece studied (can be developed into ideas for HL essay)
-Graphic organizer(?) to facilitate connections among the texts and develop understanding of intertextuality
-Creative writing: pastiche (and follow-up discussion around the concept of transformation)
-Read excerpts from an interview of Naguib Mahfouz from the Paris Review and make connections to Sartre; explore this global, asynchronous dialogue (perhaps through creative writing or social media)
- Students might interview various adults in their lives about the issue of beauty and freedom - internal freedom to be open to beauty despite the horrors of life (Agata Zolkos)

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"The condition of the native is nervous condition"

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These works speak to resistance, resilience, and humanity.
IB global issues: criminality, freedom
Lines of inquiry: creativity

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A detail of a collage by Tameca Cole, "All Locked in a Dark Calm," 2016, from "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration" at MoMA PS1, a show of art made largely by inmates of the U.S. prison system. Credit... Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Critic's Pick

The harshness of life behind bars is designed to crush inmates' individuality. But a stirring exhibition at MoMA PS1 shows the prison-industrial complex can't stifle the artistic impulse.

A detail of a collage by Tameca Cole, "All Locked in a Dark Calm," 2016, from "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration" at MoMA PS1, a show of art made largely by inmates of the U.S. prison system. Credit... Karsten Moran for The New York Times

We're living in a post-fact time, but that doesn't mean there are no facts. Here are some. The United States has the largest population of captive human beings on earth, around 2.4 million, and an outsized percentage of them are Black. Since the 1980s, prison life sentences have quadrupled; the minimum age for imprisonment has dropped; the use of solitary confinement, sometimes referred to as "no-touch torture," has grown.

The result is the prison-industrial complex we know, a punitive universe walled off from the larger world. What takes place behind those walls? Deprivation and cruelty, but also the production of art, as we learn from "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration," a stirring 44-artist show at the reopened MoMA PS1.

A beta version of the show appeared in 2018 at the Aperture Foundation in Manhattan, organized by Nicole R. Fleetwood, a professor of American studies and art history at Rutgers University. Dr. Fleetwood is also guest curator of the MoMA PS 1 exhibition and author of a lucid new book that provides the show's title and defines what she calls "carceral aesthetics," an art shaped by radically constricted space, an untethered institutional time and material scarcity.

Image

Among materials in short supply are traditional art media, so substitutes have to be found. During a 20-year confinement in an Ohio state prison beginning in 1991, the inmate-artist Dean Gillispie constructed tabletop fantasy version of images from his working class childhood: miniature gas stations, movie houses, and roadside diners. He built them from scavenged trash - Popsicle sticks, cigarette-pack foil and recycled tea bags - held together with pins purloined from the prison sewing shop. (His was a high-profile case of wrongful conviction for rape, kidnapping and burglary before the Ohio Innocence Project secured his release; the indictment was dismissed in 2015.)

In 2012, at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fairton, N.J., Gilberto Rivera, a former Brooklyn street artist, also made use of resources at hand. In angry reaction to a hostile encounter with a guard, he created a big, messy action-painting style assemblage from prison documents and a torn-up inmate uniform, using floor wax - his prison job was mopping floors - as a binder. He titled the results "An Institutional Nightmare."

How he managed to hide the piece, which is in the show, and then spirit it out of the prison, I don't know. But the challenges can't have been as great as those faced by another Fairton inmate, Jesse Krimes, who had the task of preserving a much larger work of his own.

Mr. Krimes had just graduated from college with an art degree in 2008 when he was arrested and sentenced to jail on a drug offense. (With few exceptions, Dr. Fleetwood steers clear of mentioning the specific reasons the artists in the show were incarcerated, presumably to avoid having their art read through the lens of criminality.) He quickly came to understand how psychologically damaging the prison environment could be, and knew that only a focus on art-making would save his sanity.

From this realization came what turned out to be a carceral magnum opus: a cinematically scaled, labor intensive heaven-and-hell landscape composed of images culled from newspapers, fashion glossies and art magazines, with all the images transfer-printed - using hair gel as a medium - onto more than three dozen prison-issued bedsheets. With the help of fellow inmates and cooperative guards, he was able, over three years, to mail the sheets, one at a time, out to friends. It was only after his release in 2014 that he got to see the panels united as a single work measuring 15 feet tall and 40 feet wide. He called it "Apokaluptein 16389067," combining the Greek verb "to reveal" and his prison number.

No less ambitious in scale, though executed in much smaller increments, is a room-filling piece by Mark Loughney, who is in prison in Pennsylvania. Titled "Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study of Mass Incarceration," it's a wraparound floor-to-ceiling installation of some 500 head-shot-style drawings of the artist's prison mates. In the most recent depictions, done after the beginning of the pandemic, the sitters wear face masks.

As Dr. Fleetwood writes in her book, one of the calculated effects of incarceration is the breaking down of the prisoner's sense of individuality and agency. Portraits, which are highly valued in prison communities, and self-portraits are an assertion of both.

A self-portrait by Mr. Loughney is an example: It's part of the portrait ensemble but, done in bright blue ink, it also stands out. A painted self-portrait by the San Francisco artist Ronnie Goodman, who did time for burglary at San Quentin State Prison, is comparably self-defining. He depicts himself making prints in a prison workshop with his portraits of other inmates hanging on the wall behind him. (Released in 2010, Mr. Goodman died in one of the city's homeless encampments earlier this year.)

There are many self-depictions in the show. An imposing one by Russell Craig - a self-taught artist who, since his release from Graterford State Prison, has painted public murals in his native Philadelphia - is nine-feet tall and fills a gallery wall. Another, called "Locked in a Dark Calm" by Tameca Cole, is standard printer paper size. Made in reaction to an incident of jail mistreatment, it's a collage of a fragmented female face emerging from, or sinking into, a sea of densely scribbled graphic lines.

And an exquisite pencil self-portrait by Billy Sell (1976-2013) feels as personal as a signature. Serving a life sentence in a California prison for attempted murder, and kept in isolation there, Mr. Sell died while participating in a statewide prison hunger strike protesting solitary confinement. Prison officials called his death a suicide, though the cause has since been questioned.

Mr. Sell is one of several artists in the show involved in political activism while incarcerated. Another is Ojure Lutalo, arrested in 1975 while robbing a bank to gain funds for a Black revolutionary group. He spent much of his 22 years in isolation units where he produced hundreds of text-intensive collages protesting institutional racism. He is straightforward in calling his work "visual propaganda," though not all the political art in the show is as bluntly instrumental.

In an outstanding contribution, James "Yaya" Hough - sentenced, at 17, to life without parole for murder, and released after 27 years in 2019 - fills two gallery walls with fantastically nightmarish line drawings of figures that shape-shift between male and female, punisher and punished.

Some of these works were made years after an inmate's release, showing how the unsettling conditions of prison continued to shape their lives. In a 2018 video, "Ain't I a Woman," Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, who goes by the hip-hop name Isis Tha Saviour, re-enacts a traumatic event in her own past - she went through labor in prison while shackled to a stretcher - to address the historical subjugation of Black women. The video's title is a quote from the abolitionist and former slave Sojourner Truth.

It is one of several works in the show that link mass incarceration to slavery. A painting by Jared Owens overlays a blueprint of a modern prison with an 18th-century diagram of a slave ship. Photographs by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick document notoriously brutal daily life at Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, built on the site of a 19th-century cotton plantation.

Neither Mr. Calhoun nor Ms. McCormick has been incarcerated, nor have a few other artists Dr. Fleetwood has included, among them Sara Bennett, Maria Gaspar, and Sable Elyse Smith. In that sense they're coming to the subject from outside. Yet in their work the political and personal feel inseparable. And in the show, overall, inside and outside, guilt and innocence, perpetrator and victim feel like fluid concepts.

Ms. Smith's art - sculpture, performance, poetry - is framed by the fact that her father began a life sentence for murder when she was 10. His subsequent absence - and, indirectly, the crime he was convicted of - have shaped her life and her growing and remarkable body of art.

The impetus for the exhibition itself had a similar source. Dr. Fleetwood's longstanding interest in the inequities of the American prison system began with her own experience of having close male relatives serving long-term sentences. Her firsthand account of these realities, and their effect on her extended African-American family, forms the moving final chapter of her book.

In the end, the exhibition - which Dr. Fleetwood organized with the curators Amy Rosenblum-Martín, Jocelyn Miller and Josephine Graf - complicates the definition of crime itself, expanding it beyond the courtroom into American society.

It's a society in which racism often determines presumption of guilt; in which imprisonment - human disempowerment and erasure - is chosen over righting the inequities that lead to prison. It's a society in which caging people is big corporate business, with connections reaching everywhere, including the art world. This was made clear in recent protests targeting museum trustees - Tom Gores, the private equity investor, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Larry Fink, chairman and chief executive of BlackRock, at MoMA - for their investments in the prison-industrial complex.

The scales of justice are sensitive and shifting. The only way to rightly balance them is with a steady, passionate eye and a judicious touch, and that's where art itself comes in.
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Through April 4 atMoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens; moma.org/ps1. Entry is by advance timed tickets.

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Critic's Pick The harshness of life behind bars is designed to crush inmates' individuality. But a stirring exhibition at MoMA PS1 shows the prison-industrial complex can't stifle the artistic impulse. A detail of a collage by Tameca Cole, "All Locked in a Dark Calm," 2016, from "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration" at MoMA PS1, a show of art made largely by inmates of the U.S.

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A chronology of key events in the history of Egypt from 7000 BC to the present day

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"Gazbia Sirry [20th century Egyptian artist] stood out for her dedication to the individual freedom of the Arab woman through her fighting spirit [...] Her figures seem to be struggling to emerge from the whirlpool of life, or have gathered together for sheer survival in an urban environment gone astray.

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A podcast about hip-hop and its commodification and social influence in the United States. It has an episode about what they term the "prison to prison" pipeline (versus school-to-prison pipeline) and the role that hip-hop plays in response. The episode focuses on a woman's story (they argue that it rarely gets addressed in public discourse).

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subscribe to Louder Than A Riot podcast

subscribe to Louder Than A Riot podcast

Hip-hop loves a hero's come-up - those stories of underdogs who make it to the top. But the culture tends to have a hard time seeing women as heroes, often diluting them into tropes instead: sex symbol, sister, mother.

Two years ago, when Louder Than A Riot editor Chiquita Paschal discovered she had a sister - who rapped - she quickly saw what it takes to push back against those stereotypes. Chiquita's sister, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, is Philly rapper Isis Tha Saviour, an identity born out of the need to save herself.

At age 11, Mary had to make the impossible choice to either remain in the custody of her mother who has schizophrenia or become a ward of the state. She chose the latter, and was shuffled from institution to institution: group homes, hospitals, behavioral programs and, eventually, a prison stint. Mary had to look for solace in places other than home. She found it in friends, music and the mythology of the goddess Isis.

In this episode, Chiquita takes us on Mary's hero's journey. And together, they delve into incarceration's ripple effects on families like theirs, and how the art of hip-hop can help transform trauma into freedom.
To follow along with the music in this episode, check out the Louder Than A Riot playlists on To connect with us, follow the show on Twitter @LouderThanARiot, or send us an email at louder@npr.org.Apple Music & Spotify. We'll update them every week.

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'Prison To Prison Pipeline': Isis Tha Saviour : Louder Than A Riot

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Hip-hop loves a hero's come-up, but the culture often has a hard time seeing women as heroes. Two years ago, when Louder Than A Riot editor Chiquita Paschal discovered she had a sister - who rapped - she quickly saw how that double standard can take shape.

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Excerpt from Mon Egypte, Dialogues avec Mohamed Salmawy (by Naguib Mahfouz, 1996)

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Excerpt from Mon Egypte, Dialogues avec Mohamed Salmawy (by Naguib Mahfouz, 1996)

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Egypt is not just a piece of land. Egypt is the inventor of civilisation ... The strange thing is that this country of great history and unsurpassed civilisation is nothing but a thin strip along the banks of the Nile ... This thin strip of land created moral values, launched the concept of monotheism, developed arts, invented science and gave the world a stunning administration. These factors enabled the Egyptians to survive while other cultures and nations withered and died ... Throughout history Egyptians have felt that their mission is to tend to life. They were proud to turn the land green, to make it blossom with life. The other thing is that Egyptians invented morality long before the major religions appeared on earth. Morality is not just a system for control but a protection against chaos and death ... Egypt gave Islam a new voice. It didn't change the basic tenets of Islam, but its cultural weight gave Islam a new voice, one it didn't have back in Arabia. Egypt embraced an Islam that was moderate, tolerant and non-extremist. Egyptians are very pious, but they know how to mix piety with joy, just as their ancestors did centuries ago. Egyptians celebrate religious occasions with flair. For them, religious festivals and the month of Ramadan are occasions to celebrate life.

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Taha Hussein (Modernist writer & intellectual)
Sayyid Qutb (Muslim Brotherhood, East vs. West, fundamentalism)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHpFIk2KN3I&ab_channel=TheAmericanUniversityinCairoPress

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The AUC Press documentary on Naguib Mahfouz

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Cultural and Contextual Background of the Cafe's Influence

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Cultural and Contextual Background of the Cafe's Influence

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2tRFvAU2rQ&ab_channel=AlJazeeraEnglish

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The Cafe - Egypt: The revolution continues

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Transformation, Choice, Freedom in Prison

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Transformation, Choice, Freedom in Prison

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Article about prisoners making sacrifices to fundraise for a prep school student
Prison and Prep School documentary

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Watch "This Is Life with Lisa Ling" Sundays at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET/PT. Find more episodes on CNNgo.

What does it mean to make a change in your life - and what does it mean to make a total transformation?

It's the kind of contemplative question you might bring up in a soul-searching conversation with a friend. In this case, it was being considered by a man serving a life sentence at a California prison.

"We talk about transformation in here, (and) we make a distinction between change and transformation, right?" James Jacobs said to fellow inmates during a group discussion earlier this year.

For Jacobs, change had been a slow and steady process over the 16 years he'd been in lockup. But it wasn't until the 32-year-old was confronted with a life-and-death decision behind bars that he realized he wanted to transform, becoming someone entirely different than the person he'd been before.

'Be ye transformed'

Jacobs was 15 years old when he shot and killed someone in an argument outside of a nightclub in 2004. He was sentenced to a total of 40 years to life.

By the time he was 20, Jacobs said, he was suicidal.

"Once I got through that period ... I decided I was going to try to make something out of being incarcerated," he said. He began to take advantage of rehabilitative programs focused on anger management and victim's awareness, which are used to help prisoners understand the impact of their actions on their victims.

Five years later, Jacobs continued, those efforts were put to the test when he discovered that a fellow inmate he'd come to know was believed to be responsible for the death of Jacobs' brother - an event that happened within days of Jacobs' own crime.

When he heard this news, Jacobs said, he realized how easy it would be to reverse his progress. "I had the opportunity to change back into the kid who took a 20-year-old's life for no reason, no justifiable reason," he said. "I could live in the conversation that I've been having in my head since my brother died: Vengeance. Retribution."

But more than anything, Jacobs said, he wanted forgiveness. "I want to be forgiven for what I had taken from this family when I was 15 years old," he said. "And in that moment ... I remember the (Biblical) scripture saying, 'Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.' The God that I believe in was not telling me to change (but to) be something new. Something completely different. Something you are not in this moment. Because in that moment, I'm mad. I'm vengeful. I'm retributive. (And) in that moment, I made the choice to transform."

He chose to extend the same forgiveness he seeks. "Not only because he is entitled to be redeemed. Not only because I want to go home," Jacobs said. "But because I want to be something new."

California Gov. Gavin Newsom commuted Jacobs' sentence earlier this month to make him eligible to seek parole immediately because Jacobs "has dedicated himself to his rehabilitation and becoming a productive citizen" since he was imprisoned. "This act of clemency does not minimize or forgive his conduct or the harm it caused," Newsom's statement says. "It does recognize the work he has done since to transform himself."

Jacobs shared his story as the CNN Original Series "This Is Life with Lisa Ling" filmed at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad, California, for an episode about a reading program that connects prep school students with prisoners facing life sentences. You can listen to Jacobs' speech below.

His wasn't the only story of transformation during the making of the episode. Below, hear from two other inmates who describe how they, too, have sought restoration.

'A moral obligation'

For seven years, Palma School in nearby Salinas has partnered with the Correctional Training Facility on a reading program that brings together a small group of students and prisoners to learn from one another and foster empathy.

Earlier this year, two CTF inmates were given special permission to attend an assembly at Palma and share their stories with the private school's students. One of the two was Alfredo "Freddie" Ortega, who was incarcerated in 2008 and is eligible for parole in June 2030.

In his speech, Ortega was candid about his upbringing and the decisions he made as a teen to join a gang. Now 37 years old and facing a life sentence, Ortega reflected on how past fears and insecurities led him to where he sits today, and how he wants to live his life going forward.

"Growing up, I allowed myself to develop an unhealthy desire to be accepted by my friends, who also became gang members. My childhood fears of being different, the fear of rejection, fear of not being liked, fear of not fitting in led me to seek acceptance, recognition and attention from my peers ... (and) contributed to my violent behavior," Ortega told the Palma students. "Today I am deeply ashamed that I became that selfish, impulsive and irresponsible person that cared very little for the right of others and cared nothing for their safety. Today I feel a moral obligation to live my life in a manner that displays compassion, kindness, respect and dignity towards others."

Listen to Ortega's story below.

'I'm going to do something new'

Vincent Rivera, 35, spoke frankly about his path toward transformation. Along with Jacobs, he shared his history, and how he found himself in a space where he wanted to become something new.

"When I came to prison, I had a choice to make," Rivera said. "What am I going to do? How am I going to fit in? ... I thought like, man, this is it. I'm going to die in prison. I came to prison with 96 years to life."

But, he said, "I made a decision for my future. I made a decision that says, 'You know what? I'm going to do something new that I've never done before. I'm going to start making right decisions.'"

While the death of his father tested his resolve, Rivera said, he remains committed to his new direction. "It (was) an invitation to do one of two things: either I could backslide a little bit and justify it by my father's death, or I could use it to motivate me to go forward.'

Rivera has been in prison since 2013 and is eligible for parole in April 2035. Listen to Rivera's story below.

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From behind bars, hear three stories of transformation | CNN

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What does it mean to make a change in your life -- and what does it mean to make a total transformation? Three men incarcerated at a prison in Soledad, California shared what transformation means to them while filming "This Is Life with Lisa Ling."

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history of impressionist art - Google Search

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Naguib Mahfouz's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

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Naguib Mahfouz's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

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Google Earth Locations in The Thief and The Dogs

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Google Earth Locations in The Thief and The Dogs

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What You Should Know

Egyptian artists drew on a tradition of political engagement and social commentary to become important figures in the 2011 uprising and the years of protest that followed.

Changes in media, the increased exposure afforded by the Internet, and the growing commercial market for fine art in the Middle East elevated the importance and reach of Egyptian artists in the years leading up to the revolution.

As authoritarianism has dashed revolutionary hopes and chilled free speech, Egyptian art has suffered, but it remains an outlet for dissent and a vital channel of expression.

This report is part of "Arab Politics Beyond the Uprisings: Experiments in an Era of Resurgent Authoritarianism," a multi-year TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Egyptian artists have a long history of political engagement. Even in the mid-twentieth century, when they mostly relied on state funding, they made critiques of the ruling regimes, and created one of the few spaces where independent political thought could brew. Egyptian artists-like their counterparts in many other countries in the region-have long been in closer touch with the mood of average people than the repressive governments have been, and they have served as both bellwethers and instigators of change. When the revolution broke out in 2011, Egyptian artists were thus well positioned to take on a much more direct, activist role, and many did. Art changed as well, becoming more accessible and purpose-driven. Now, as the tide again has turned to authoritarianism, the unbridled hope of the uprising has waned, negatively affecting art as much as any other part of the revolution. Yet there are glimmers of dissent in the art that lives on, and many reasons to think that Egyptian artists will be part of the vanguard of the next wave of social and political change, whatever it may be.
Just after 3:00 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 15, 2012, four young Egyptians, armed with spray cans and stencils, crept through the Cairo night. It was ten days before Egypt's historic post-revolution election, the first free one in history. Their leader, underground artist El Zeft (a word that translates into "asphalt" but in colloquial Arabic is used to denote rubbish), took them to the former headquarters of the National Democratic Party (NDP), not too far from Tahrir Square, the site of the Egyptian uprising of 2011. The NDP was the political party associated with the corrupt three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak, and the building was slated for demolition after the party was disbanded by court order and had its assets seized. The four men, all in their early twenties, were careful not to alert the officers guarding the building.

The activists silently approached the wall next to the main gate and quickly spray-painted two words, "Opening Soon," using a stencil designed by El Zeft. Photojournalist Jonathan Rashad had, within seconds of its completion, snapped a picture of the graffiti that went viral on social media even before the Friday noon prayers later that day. The message: Egypt may be about to vote, but too many signs pointed to a reemergence of the repression and authoritarianism of the ancien régime. The army immediately dispatched a team to paint over the graffiti, but it was too late. It was the talk of the town that week in Cairo.

It was also prescient. The freely elected if inept and divisive government of Mohamed Morsi would last little more than a year before being unseated by a coup, which in turn would lead to the installation of the current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. And Sisi's regime would soon prove to be even more suffocating than the NDP's.

El Zeft's graffiti bombing was, in a way, the zenith of a period of activist popular art in Egypt, when artists and revolutionaries worked hand in hand, and were often one and the same. For decades, Egyptian fine arts had been supported and managed by state patronage. During that time, Egyptian artists accomplished much, including making works of beauty that often contained subtle critiques of the social and political status quo. The artists created a community with their salons and expositions that became one of the few fonts of independent political expression of any kind. For many years, state repression circumscribed the community's broader impact. But when the uprising of 2011 began, Egyptian artists were well positioned to play an important role in responding to the unrest and creating iconic imagery. Their passion for social justice and political change was evident in their work and activism.

The occupation of Tahrir Square, and the revolution that followed, broke open bold new spaces for Egyptian artists. They in turn broke open new spaces for political discourse. Some of the older generations of artists never got much involved with the revolution, but others happily forsook the comfort of galleries and the competition for state support in favor of the street. For a time, the lines between high- and lowbrow were blurred, and Egyptian art experienced a dynamism and immediacy unseen in recent history, as it engaged directly in political tumult. Creators like El Zeft, who had little or no professional training, were all of a sudden propelled into the limelight as major voices calling out for change on the streets of Egypt.

The pattern of melting boundaries and the flourishing of art as activism repeated itself throughout much of the Arab world during the years of the uprisings. But in Egypt as elsewhere, it didn't last. As the uprisings faltered, cynicism spread in the art world, as it did in other sectors of society. Activist street art, quick to flare in importance during the first two years of the revolution, very quickly receded to its margins under the repressive control of Sisi's rule. The pool of active artists has shrunk. Yet many have continued to create, express, and comment, and remain a highly relevant cultural force-one of the few alternatives to the stultifying mainstream political dialogue.

To trace the history of Arab art from the mid-twentieth century through the uprisings and to the present reveals a great churning of ideas, social awareness, and activism that are not evident in the study of official politics. Arab art has tapped into alternative, popular histories, within boundaries that contract in times of authoritarianism and expanded during the uprisings to unprecedented levels. The creative fire of these artists has never been extinguished. Egypt's fine arts community-even during the regimes of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Mubarak-grappled in meaningful ways with fundamental political questions, though artists' direct involvement with political struggles was minimal until the uprisings. The surge of politicized artists who occupied Tahrir from 2011 to 2013 was exceptional in Egypt's history, but also echoed the political activism and engagement of earlier generations of Egyptian artists.

Art in the Arab world has been, and continues to be, almost divinatory.

In that vein, Egyptian art points us to a future of continued political engagement and an intense desire for social progress that the new authoritarians are quite unlikely to deliver on their own. Artists are mobile, vocal, and ever more clever with pushing boundaries. The fervor and optimism of the revolutionary days of only a few years ago may have subsided and organized political blocs may have fractured. But the new strongmen of Egypt are unlikely to succeed at completely boxing in expression.

Egyptian Art in the Postcolonial Era

The twentieth century was tumultuous for Egypt, but a period in which the country's creators of fine art-al-fanoun al-jamila-found their footing and even flourished. Ironically, successive Egyptian regimes' repression managed to give a boost to fine art, even as they caused other forms of expression to wilt. Nasser (president from 1956 to 1970) and his successors had a respect for fine art, and considered its achievements a point of national pride. At the same time, they believed it to be mostly appreciated by elites, and therefore not dangerous. Thus, they gave artists grants and wide latitude to create what they liked, even if it subtly critiqued the state or the status quo. As long as what they created wasn't consumed or obvious enough to be appreciated by the masses, fine artists were mostly allowed to paint and sculpt as they pleased. As a result, a great deal of creative energy was channeled into the fine arts.

The Monarchy under British Occupation, 1922-52

As early as the mid-1930s, a group of Egyptian intellectuals and artists influenced by surrealism and headed by author Georges Henein (1914-73) came together and launched the Art and Liberty Group. The movement was socially liberal, and favored anti-capitalist economics and Freudian psychological ideas. But it also extended deeper into attacking the British occupation of Egypt, Egyptian monarchists, exploitation of women and workers, and Islamic nationalism. The movement lasted for just a decade, from 1938-48, eventually disbanded by the Egyptian police and British Occupation Forces at the beginning of the Cold War. However, its impact was long-lasting and it has enjoyed a revival in 2016-17 with a series of exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.).

During this period, one of the most noted incidents of artist political activism within a work of art was that of Abdul Hadi al-Gazzar (1925-66), the son of an Alexandrian religious scholar. In 1951 when Gazzar was twenty-six years old, he submitted a painting to an exhibition at the invitation of his teacher, Contemporary Art Group founder Hussein Youssef Amin (1904-84). The work, which goes by several names but is most commonly known as Hunger, is now one of the most famous paintings in Egypt. It depicts a group of eight barefooted women and a child, standing side by side with empty plates in front of them, signifying poverty. Hunger was regarded as a clear criticism of the monarchy and the ruling elite, and resulted in Gazzar being briefly detained along with Amin. Both men were released following an intervention by the renowned Egyptian lawyer-artists Mohammed Nagi and Mahmoud Said. Following his release, Gazzar painted a second version of Hunger, after the original was sequestered, according to an interview conducted by researcher Fatenn Mostafa Kanafani with the late artist's wife Laila Effat.

The period of the monarchy was thus marked by significant antagonism between artists and the Egyptian state. In subsequent decades, the government's relationship with artists was not always adversarial. In fact, the artists under Egyptian government patronage produced much work that advanced government policies and ideas. But whatever the nature of their advocacy and relation to the state, by the middle of the century it was well established that Egyptian artists were, by nature, political.

From Nasser to Sadat: 1952-81

After the revolution of 1952, Egypt, like Ba'athist Syria and Iraq, reserved a part of its budget for culture and viewed state-sponsored art as a significant arm of government information or propaganda policy. State-supported and independent artists didn't necessarily disagree at all times. Common causes such as the rejection of colonial rule and, later, anti-Zionism brought together governments and artists from opposite ends of the political spectrum across the Arab world. For instance, painter Hamed Ewais (1919-2011) repeatedly created works commissioned by Nasser's government during the nationalization of the Suez Canal and even after Egypt's defeat in the war of 1967.

Alternatively, artists who received government grants to travel to the Aswan High Dam construction site, like the painters Tahia Halim (1919-2003), Ragheb Ayad (1892-1982), and Effat Naghi (1905-94), offered critical insights into the precarious nature of the massive project. Halim, who documented Nubian villages in her paintings before the construction of the dam flooded them, showed how potentially destructive the government project could be by offering a glimpse into the lives of villagers who were forced to permanently resettle. Ayad and Naghi were similarly commissioned by the state to document the building of the dam in the 1960s. In both artists' work, we see different approaches that depict a less glorified image of the project than what the government usually promoted. In Ayad's 1964 painting Aswan, his waif-like characters seem to be laboring endlessly upon various heights of rocky terrain. His composition is arranged in such a way that each worker loses his individuality and appears like one of many hieroglyphic slaves constructing the Pyramids of Giza. Naghi's documentation focuses on the scaffolding that appears like a teetering edifice of wood and metal, and eliminates the presence of laborers altogether. Naghi's approach takes the loss of humanity in Ayad's work further and highlights the precarious nature of the ambitious dam project.

Implicitly critical as they were of projects like the High Dam that were usually cornerstones of patriotic propaganda, these artists' work had limited popular and certainly minimal political impact. The works appeared in museums, and though beautiful and affecting, did not reach the masses. Nor did they spur any elite revolt against the country's leadership. It would be decades until satellites and the Internet could convey images to broader audiences, but in any case the style of mid-century art was removed from the tastes of the vast majority of Egyptians, and its critiques were delivered with too much subtlety to have had a direct impact on politics. Nevertheless, the artists managed to continue their community's tradition of dissent.

Anwar Sadat (president from 1970 to 1981), like his predecessor Nasser, tried to silence his critics, including intellectuals and artists. He became even more notorious than Nasser, however, for his blanket blacklisting of artists such as painter and sculptor George Bahgoury (1932- ) who was exiled from Egypt and spent many years in Paris. Following the signing of the Camp David accords, Bahgoury published Banned Artworks, his famous book of caricatures mocking Sadat.

Throughout this time, artists continued their expression about international political and social issues. They commemorated the Nakba (or "Catastrophe," as the events surrounding the 1948 founding of the state of Israel on historic Palestine are known in the Arab world), and the defeat of the Arab armies in 1967, known as the Naksa. They mourned the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982, and celebrated the independence of their countries from colonial powers. All of these events were of earnest importance to broad swaths of the region's societies.

Regional Patterns of Repression and Expression

There was a similar pattern in other parts of the Arab world. In the Ba'athist states of Iraq and Syria, the governments embarked on programs to train and fund artists in the hopes of instilling a sense of national identity through art. Similarly, Algeria and Morocco were trying to shake off the decades of French cultural influence by supporting or tolerating artists such as M'hamed Issiakhem (Algerian, 1928-85), and Farid Belkahia (Moroccan, 1934-2014) and Mohammed Melehi (Moroccan, 1936- ) of the Casablanca Group. Kuwait, Tunisia, and Sudan also witnessed a burgeoning art scene with the founding of galleries and art societies in the 1950s and 1960s.

In fact, from the mid-twentieth century onward and across the Arab world, art societies formed in cities such as Baghdad, Kuwait City, Khartoum, Tunis, Casablanca, and elsewhere. These societies were registered by the state and sometimes received subsidies and support, and as such they were not directed against the state. However, they contributed to the production of original works with political relevance.

For instance, in the 1970s Algerian authorities commissioned the French-trained Issiakhem (who, as researcher Amina Menia notes, was an anti-colonial freedom fighter before becoming a recognized sculptor) to create a sculpture to replace the famous Monument to the Dead, which Paul Landowski made in 1928 to commemorate the fallen French and Arab soldiers of World War I. By the 1970s, the French-commissioned monument was considered an offensive relic of colonialism. Issiakhem used a large sarcophagus to enclose the sculpture as a sort of tomb, perhaps as a metaphor for the death of colonialism in Algeria.

In Iraq, master artist Jewad Selim (1919-61) erected a massive government-commissioned frieze in central Baghdad titled Monument of Liberty in 1961. The Iraqi government commissioned the giant work to commemorate the July 14 Revolution of 1958 that led to the overthrow of the British-backed Hashemite monarchy. The bronze work comprised twenty-five human figures spread across more than two-dozen panels along with depictions of a horse and a bull, in what could be considered a nod to Picasso's Guernica.

Both the Algerian and Iraqi works were far from being critiques of the governments that commissioned them, yet they were hardly propaganda. Instead, they reflected popular sentiment and contributed to a vibrant mid-twentieth century arts scene that still resonates today, long after the regimes that paid for them have disappeared. As in Egypt, despite state patronage, artists' communities became petri dishes for other kinds of political change, over which the governments that sponsored them had little ultimate control.

Mubarak and the Dissolution of State Control: 1981-2011

Although Nasser and Sadat both pandered to intellectuals, Mubarak took things a step further by appointing abstract painter Farouk Hosny as his minister of culture, where he remained for twenty-four years. This maximized Mubarak's ability to control the arts, by directing funding and overseeing state-run exhibition spaces. The co-option was far from complete, however. As calculating as Mubarak's art patronage was, there were bigger forces at play that undermined his efforts-namely, the global information revolution, and the rise of a private regional art market that was closely linked to it, loosened the binds of state patronage.

In the twentieth century heyday of state-sponsored art in the Arab world, there was no art market to speak of and few, if any, galleries. Most artists were teachers who sold works on the side, and were not dependent on buyers. By the turn of the twenty-first century, this had begun to change. By the second decade of the new century, it was all but upended: satellite television, streaming video, and social media sites enabled young artists who had emerged since the late 1980s to see events that touched others' lives in immediate terms. Contemporary artists became more dynamic and able to react more spontaneously, and with wider reach. Also, far greater access to private funding became available to the young artist, thanks to a proliferation of galleries across the region. Direct criticism of government might be hazardous to an artist's physical safety, but it was no longer a direct threat to his pocket book.

Direct criticism of government might be hazardous to an artist's physical safety, but it was no longer a direct threat to his pocket book.

Collectors in the wealthy Arab states of the Gulf were a major force in the creation of this private market. Dubai emerged as the Middle East's most important market for art. Scores of galleries opened in its industrial and financial centers, and Christie's and local galleries such as Ayyam conducted auctions.

The Rise of the New Media

In Egypt in particular, there was another factor that, perhaps coincidentally, undermined Mubarak's strategies for managing expression even more. Through the 1980s and 1990s, modern art gave way to contemporary practices, and a new generation of artists emerged whose media were harder to control through government funding and state promotion. Photography and video became more widely used, conceptual approaches made their debut, digital devices and media became available, and the dwindling cost of transport meant that complex works could be created or assembled abroad, and could be shipped internationally to be loaned for exhibitions. These developments gradually loosened the government's control over the arts industry. Cutting-edge, vibrant forms of expression were now being created outside the patronage of the state.

Cutting-edge, vibrant forms of expression were now being created outside the patronage of the state.

Among this new generation of contemporary artists is the sculptor Moataz Nasr (1961- ) who has, since the early years of the twenty-first century, created socially conscious works, including An Ear of Mud, Another of Dough. Made of clay and dough ears, it symbolizes the deafness of the ruling class's ears to the plight of most Egyptians. Nasr also established the group Darb 1718 in 2008, dedicated to promoting social change through art.

The degree of freedom that artists had obtained around the turn of the century may not have seemed like a threat to Mubarak at the time. But the astute connoisseur could have read something of the future in the works that were emerging from Egypt toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Indeed, many of the region's artists had an uncanny ability to capture the mood of their country and even foresee its problems. Cairo-born painter Walid Ebeid's (1970- ) 2005 work Outside Prisoners depicts men, women and children, money in hand, clamoring to buy bread, where there clearly isn't enough for all of them. The perspective is from within a stall with prison-like bars, stopping them from making the payment. Little do those in the back know that there are just six or seven loaves of bread left. Another of Ebeid's works, the 2007 painting Under Investigation, depicts a young man, possibly in his twenties, sitting on a stool with his back to the viewer. The man's white t-shirt is lifted, unveiling bruises and others signs of torture and beating. In Ebeid's work we see a much more contemporary strain of Arab art that directly antagonizes the state: claims of torture, especially in the last years of Mubarak's reign, contributed to the outburst of anger that occurred in January 2011. Huda Lutfi, Professor Emerita of Arab Cultural History at the American University in Cairo, created a work in 2008 titled Democracy Is Coming. The work features the familiar face of Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum with a halo over her head and an inscription that reads "democracy is coming," as military planes fly above.

The quickening pace of change of communications technology during this period further undermined Mubarak's methods at control. Social media gave artists vastly greater and more immediate visibility, and it also allowed them to market their works directly, rather than going through a gallery. In some instances galleries might shun politically sensitive works, but artists could sell such pieces directly to collectors from their studios. This was the case for the Barjeel Art Foundation, which I founded in 2010 in the United Arab Emirates, when it acquired Jeffar Khaldi's Good Stamp (2009), which depicts Gulf Arab officials seated in a meeting hall with images of women that look like Lebanese crooner and sex symbol Haifa Wehbe, or American actress Pamela Anderson, loitering in their minds and bodies. Further, in addition to the established Cairo galleries, a number of underground pop-up shows started appearing in the city. These pop-up shows were hosted in artists' apartments and other common spaces, where they could be free of any state-imposed restrictions.

The later Mubarak years witnessed a further marginalization of the creative community in Egypt, affecting writers, journalists, and artists. But marginalization, in this new era of private art markets and amplifying technology, was far from neutralization. Sometimes, it was the opposite. The Mubarak regime might have heeded the hints of popular discontent about food prices, for example, and made incremental reforms that could have headed off a wider crisis of government legitimacy. Instead, Mubarak and his ministry of culture ignored signals from the fine art sphere, and overshadowed the work of socially conscious artists like Ebeid with inoffensive abstract works, ever widening the gulf between the government and the people.

Marginalization, in this new era of private art markets and amplifying technology, was far from neutralization. Sometimes, it was the opposite.

In the years leading to the 2011 uprising, there was a final, significant change in the Egyptian art world: graffiti art became legitimized. It was a development spurred in large part by artists under 30, who did not always conform to more traditional expectations of what art should be. For them, Cairo itself became a canvas, and new media meant that their imagination was no longer limited by the physical constraints of older forms. It was this development that more than anything else heralded a new era for Egyptian artists, who were beginning to engage directly with the broad swaths of the public through art that was overtly political.

The Uprisings

It's impossible to know exactly to what degree art contributed to the actual outbreak of the Egyptian revolution, but it certainly anticipated the anger that propelled it. And when the uprisings of 2011 erupted, artists were primed as never before to take part in the turmoil.

Take the case of Nasr, the Egyptian multimedia artist. Where his creations had tackled social and political issues in oblique and symbolic (though still provocative) ways in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, they now became explicit commentaries on the revolution. In 2012, he created El Shaab (The People)-twenty-five ceramic figures representing characters from the 2011 uprising. It is part of this sculpture, depicting a dark event that happened on the streets, which sets the work apart. On a separate shelf, but part of the same work, Nasr placed figures representing three police officers tugging at a young woman and dragging her along the street so that her bra was exposed. This was the famous "Girl in the Blue Bra," whose violent beating at the hands and feet of the police, in Cairo in December 2011, was captured by Al-Masry Al-Youm photographer Ahmed al-Masry. In 2012, thousands of Egyptians still treated this horrific scene as a rallying point for their continued protests calling for revolutionary demands to be met, and for the Supreme Council of Armed Forces-the military body that was then running Egypt-to hand over power to a civilian head of state through democratic elections.

The same image of the "Girl in the Blue Bra" was used by Egyptian artist Nermine Hammam (1967- ) in a photo series that juxtaposes iconic images from the revolution with serene images drawn from Japanese landscape painting. Morocco's Zakaria Ramhani (1983- ) also references this scene in his piece You Were My Only Love (2012); Palestine's Shadi Alzaqzouq featured women's underwear and protest, perhaps inspired by the same moment, in his painting After Washing (2012).

In 2012, at the height of the presidential election season, Egypt-born Australian artist Raafat Ishak (1967- ) created Nomination for the Presidency of the New Egypt. The artwork is a fictional manifesto by a presidential candidate created on a series of fiberboard panels that unfold like a scroll. Some Egyptians laid the blame for the deterioration of the economy on decisions taken under the country's socialist president, Nasser. In that regard, the manifesto by the candidate comes with a radical promise to dismantle the Aswan High Dam in order to reintroduce the annual flooding of the Nile, alluding "to a metaphoric deconstruction of Egypt's turbulent history and a political rebirth of the country."

Some artists, especially graffiti artists, also had an even more direct role in the Egyptian revolution. Savvy with digital media and deeply invested in revolutionary goals, they were able to articulate the people's demands, or the chance to realize them, into a symbol. Ganzeer's Mask of Freedom (2011)-depicting a figure with a ball gag and blindfold-was a potent message about the lack of freedom of expression, which was prominently circulated in the beginning of that year. In a Cairo protest in which I participated in 2012, activists handed out spray cans and a stencil created by El Zeft. Hundreds of people used them to paint phrases like "We won't forget you" and "Glory to the martyrs."

And in the first three years following the 2011 uprising, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which is adjacent to the old campus of the American University in Cairo, served as a shrine to the fallen icons of the uprising. It featured images of Khalid Said, whose death in 2010 was one of the sparks for revolt. A mural of Coptic icon Mina Danial reaching out to Muslim cleric Sheikh Emad Effat (both shot and killed in 2011 protests) was interlaced with politically charged phrases. Writing in 2012, critic and blogger Soraya Morayef noted that "the Mohamed Mahmoud wall remains the most powerful tribute to the revolution." These works resonated with passersby who would stop and take photos, recognizing some figures, and the street came close to becoming a tourist attraction in its own right. It was a site for protests, as well. In November 2011, it erupted in clashes as security forces attempted to violently disperse a crowd of two hundred protesting family members of those who had been killed in earlier demonstrations. Similarly, following the death of seventy-two football fans in Port Said in February 2012, Mohamed Mahmoud once again became a rallying point with paintings depicting the fallen fans. Perhaps eager to turn a page, at three o'clock on a September 2012 morning, the Egyptian government dispatched workers to paint over the graffiti on Mohamed Mahmoud street.

Regional Reverberations

The Arab uprisings featured in works of artists outside Egypt and across the region and in the diaspora. Beirut-born Ali Cherri (1976- ) lived through Lebanon's devastating civil war and is considered to be a promising artist of his generation. His 2014-16 aerial maps print series Paysages Tremblants (Trembling Landscapes) is an attempt to capture the underlying tensions in Middle Eastern and North African cities, including Beirut, Damascus, and Algiers (an entire set has been acquired by the Guggenheim Museum in New York). Perhaps Cherri's work that most obviously references the Arab uprisings is I Carry My Flame (2011). It was created mere months after Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight, thereby kick-starting a series of convulsions that have since rocked the Arab world. In that artwork, eight stills are taken from a YouTube video of an unknown individual (not Bouazizi) who embarked on an act of self-immolation. Even the process of creating these works using serigraphy or silkscreen printing, where ink is forced through a fine screen onto the paper beneath, reflects the violence and duress that an individual set on fire experiences. Finally, Le Grand Vide/Statue Assad features a 2011 photograph of the remains of a sculpture of Syria's Hafez al-Assad that was pulled down in the early days of the Syrian uprising. The name of the work is also remarkable, denoting the void that was created following the collapse of the regime in some parts of Syria, a void that extremist groups were all too willing to fill.

The politically minded artists of the mid-twentieth century produced fine, powerful works of social commentary, but they had never so directly attacked a ruling regime. Even works that antagonized the government had nothing like the immediacy and relevance of those that commented on and contributed to the Arab uprisings. The artists of the uprisings also engaged a completely different demographic, those who would generally not be included in the political discourse of the past.

The brief free political space created following the Egyptian uprising also allowed for more politically engaging works to be shown in public. After years of making underground art, many artists came to the forefront following the revolution. Art exhibitions were more daring and thought-provoking, and attracted a more diverse crowd. In fact, art openings became places for nonartist activists to meet each other and discuss the latest political developments. The space was so vibrant that some artists in Cairo used their apartments to host semi-underground pop-up exhibitions that lasted for the evening.

In the wake of the uprisings, the Sakia also became a venue for political engagement, such as when it hosted Alaa al-Aswany, the novelist, in February 2012, drawing hundreds of men and women. Aswany began that talk with a moment of silence for Egypt's martyrs and railed against the "unconstitutional and illegal" rule of the military council.

But the fact that such art existed and played a role in the uprisings should not be confused with the idea that the artists now enjoyed more safety, any more than any of the other revolutionaries did.

A famously tragic example is that of Ahmed Basiony (1978-2011), a thirty-three-year-old Egyptian avant-garde visual artist who was shot dead by sniper fire on January 28, 2011, three days after the start of the Tahrir Square protests.

Following his killing, Basiony "quickly became a potent symbol to protestors of the sacrifices they had to endure in the course of their struggle." Al-Masry Al-Youm, a popular newspaper, included Basiony's photo on the front page of its now historic post-uprising edition under the headline, "The Flowers that Bloomed in Egypt's Garden."

Basiony was shot for protesting, not for his art. Posthumously, however, it becomes more difficult to draw a line between the two. He was an artist who fully committed himself to his beliefs. Those who appreciated his art evidently recognized this: four months after his death, following the removal of the Mubarak regime, Basiony's video installation Thirty Days of Running in Place became Egypt's official entry to the fifty-fourth Venice Biennale, in 2011. The installation was produced in 2010 and included a series of videos that depicted a man (the artist) wrapped in a sealed suit, jogging in place for an hour every day for a month, collecting and visually projecting information about the movements of his body onto a screen. Although Basiony's work wasn't initially received as political, in Venice it was shown alongside video footage of him participating in the revolution, thereby adding a political overtone.

Art and the Faltering Uprisings

As the uprisings soured, the dangers artists faced from any number of adversaries overtook the other factors that contributed to their newfound boldness. As early as 2012, as the high hopes of the Egyptian revolution began to get more complicated-if not actually fade-the art scene began to lose some of its verve and focus. Artists became more calculated in their risks. In despair or disillusionment or fear, some turned away from direct action in politics completely.

An early example of the casualties of this changing mood is the effort of the Barjeel Art Foundation to acquire a revolution-themed neon work by Moataz Nasr, The People Want the Fall of the Regime. This phrase was made popular during the Egyptian uprising earlier in 2011, as people took to the streets demanding the downfall of the Mubarak government. In fact, this work was so controversial that no Egyptian shipping firm would agree to ship it to the Gulf. On June 6, 2012 we received the following email. I have removed references to the sender to protect the person's identity.
Dear _____
I would like to update you on the status of Moataz Nasr Neon Light work.
I have deliberately halted the shipping of this long overdue artwork for a serious strategic reason-my safety. So bear with us. If you do come in the near future, best you or Sultan take it on your flight.
The piece is very controversial at this time in Egypt to be shipped out through such channel to the Emirates. Our people at the airport have checked the water and advised us to either wait or to have someone take it as luggage while travelling. The statement written on it "El Shaab Yourid Iskat el Nezam" could be seen as me (name removed), an Egyptian citizen, as trying to incite revolt in the UAE. As you may know, the UAE are very important for Egypt-politically and economically.
After several tries, the work finally arrived in the Emirates in November 2013. In order to avoid customs officials discerning the content of the Arabic words that make up the phrase, they were put into four separate packages. The label on the packaging from Egypt read "LIGHTING PEICE" (sic).

The state had lost a lot of ground with all the changes of the last two decades, in terms of technology, markets for art, and boldness on the part of the artists. But it still had some tricks up its sleeve.

The episode was a harbinger. Egyptian authorities still deeply feared free expression, though at this stage and in this instance they were more concerned about the artist's effect on foreign relations. The shipper understood that the Egyptian government might find the content of the artwork objectionable in its own right, or they might desire to censor it in order to erase any implication of Egyptians exporting revolutionary ideas around the region. By 2016, Sisi's Egypt was experiencing a wintry freeze of political artistic expression. In the post-2011 period, successive, short-lived Egyptian administrations caught in the maelstrom and consumed with crisis management paid no heed to artists, initially allowing for an unprecedented degree of openness and artistic expression. However, since the authorities largely control the levers of media in Egypt, they were able to filter or promote any artists depending on whether they considered them to be antagonistic or friendly to the government, such as denying them the opportunities to be featured on local television or newspapers. The state had lost a lot of ground with all the changes of the last two decades, in terms of technology, markets for art, and boldness on the part of the artists. But it still had some tricks up its sleeve, and with its involvement in media, its promotion of fear, and its intimidation of artists, it had quite a bit of power, perhaps more than artists at the time realized.

The State Tightens Its Vise

With the rise of Sisi, this trend has taken firmer hold day by day, to the point that some of the sheen has been taken from overtly revolutionary art. The romance of the so-called Arab Spring-a name that was hardly used in the countries where it supposedly occurred-means that revolutionary Egyptian artists could make a living selling their works abroad. The idea has proved noxious, however, and many revolutionary artists avoided any obvious commercial benefit from revolutionary themes. As the political tide turned, many artists abandoned the themes of 2011-12, some turning to more personal, abstract, or subtle subjects.

There have still been isolated instances of state criticism, and certain genres that have remained freer than others, such as editorial cartoons. JOKE, a 2013 poster mocking Sisi, by Egyptian graffiti artist Nazeer, was modeled on Shepard Fairey's "HOPE" poster of Barack Obama. However, making fun of leaders can carry hefty fines or even a jail term. In 2015, twenty-two-year-old Amr Nohan was sentenced to three years in jail for sharing a photo of Sisi with Mickey Mouse ears on Facebook.

The revolutionary fervor of artists, like other activists, has certainly been stifled. Some left art altogether. El Zeft, the artist who led the guerrilla muralists who painted the NDP headquarters, is himself an exemplary case. Five years after his daring graffiti assault, he has been drafted into the army, and is no longer active as an artist. Indeed, Sisi has made it very dangerous for anyone to attempt anything remotely resembling El Zeft's 2012 feat. The NDP headquarters have been torn down, along with the graffiti, and the piece-which had a national impact at the time-is lost, and is now hardly mentioned in Egypt.

Other artists chose self-exile, such as Ganzeer, who now lives in Los Angeles. Ganzeer, the artist who made the famous poster Mask of Freedom (2011), has continued his provocations with Who's Afraid of Art? (2014), which depicts Sisi in uniform, his face replaced by a rabbit staring from a television screen. The image was heavily shared on social media.

There is an inescapable feeling that something essential has been lost from the art world because of Sisi's repression. The raucous, pure energy of 2011-13 is gone. Speaking to artists who still practice, one feels their disillusionment, and their creeping sense of guilt when they benefit from art that references a revolution that has all but failed.

Speaking to artists who still practice, one feels their disillusionment, and their creeping sense of guilt when they benefit from art that references a revolution that has all but failed.

And yet, many continue to create. This fact gets to the paradox at the heart of Arab art in the wake of the uprisings. Artists' moods are as dismal as anyone's. But as a critic who watches art closely and communicates with artists all the time, it's impossible not to feel that something in Egyptian art went through an irreversible transformation during the uprisings, in terms of connecting directly with the masses. In those days of tumult artists got a vision of their power and possibilities. I believe that Sisi's ham-handed suffocation of the art world is temporary. The government is less adept at propaganda than ever before, and artists have more tools than ever to spread dissenting messages. When the time is right, we will again see artists at the forefront of the next wave of change, whatever that may be. Their role has been diminished, but they continue to give a voice to civil society, despite the challenges of being blocked and silenced by state media.

Conclusion

Artists, far from being solely associated with the elite or even the ruling authorities in the Arab world, have shown that they identify with popular causes and even challenge elites. They have a long tradition of providing critiques of Arab regimes-with subtlety in times of great repression, with unabashed directness in times of tumult. With the symbols their media afford them, they have often been able to express the political desires of their societies' peoples in a way that has been almost impossible through any other channels.

With the uprisings of 2011, Egyptian and Arab artists became far more deeply involved in politics-both in their art and by participating as demonstrators-and the lines between elite and popular art became blurry. But there was also continuity with the role that artists have filled since at least the early part of the twentieth century: then as now, they gave voice to the people when other means failed.

Even as the vise of authoritarian control is once more closing on artists, their role remains extremely important. Political art is one of the few outlets available, along with protesting, which is increasingly untenable. One could argue that, since art is far less disruptive than protesting in the streets, it is more of a pressure-releasing valve than a fomenter of change. As the examples in this essay have shown, however, the distinction between those two functions is oftentimes remarkably murky. Pondering which is the "real" role of art is more useful as an evaluation of a state policy than in understanding art's actual significance.

Even when it is state-sponsored, art has been successful in reflecting popular sentiments ignored or repressed by Arab governments and artists, often reflecting the pulse of general society and acting as a bridge between the common man and the ears of those who will listen. As such, Arab governments such as Egypt's, even if they were unwilling to become dramatically more democratic, might have treated art not only as a cultural asset but also as a measure of popular sentiment. Instead, most reacted to art with fear. And in the last two to three years, this fear has become more and more reactionary and stifling, especially in Egypt.

Artists keep the flame of independent thought alive in dark times.

But artists keep the flame of independent thought alive in dark times. As the Arab uprisings seem to have faltered and lost their way, art still has potential and value-not just for its aesthetics but also for its relevance to material developments. Whether as a catalyst for change, a space for dreaming about possibilities, or a mirror of the fears and violence that have afflicted the region, art continues to serve as a space where Arabs rehearse and explore their political aspirations.

BANNER IMAGE: Lara Baladi, Oum El Dounia, 2008. (Image courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde)

About This Project

This policy report is part of "Arab Politics beyond the Uprisings: Experiments in an Era of Resurgent Authoritarianism," a multi-year TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Studies in this series explore attempts to build institutions and ideologies during a period of resurgent authoritarianism, and at times amidst violent conflict and state collapse. The project documents some of the spaces where change is still emerging, as well as the dynamic forces arrayed against it. The collected essays will be published by TCF Press in June 2017.

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What You Should Know Egyptian artists drew on a tradition of political engagement and social commentary to become important figures in the 2011 uprising and the years of protest that followed. Changes in media, the increased exposure afforded by the Internet, and the growing commercial market for fine art in the Middle East elevated the importance and reach of Egyptian artists in the years leading up to the revolution.

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Comparison of 1952 + 2011 Egyptian Revolutions

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Comparison of 1952 + 2011 Egyptian Revolutions

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Political upheaval in Egypt: Disavowing troubling states of mind - Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

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The hope and optimism following the 2011 revolution that took place in Egypt have been replaced with anger, despair and disappointment. The majority of the Egyptian population is struggling due to dire material conditions that are causing immense suffering. For many, increasing authoritarianism and the stronghold of the ‘Deep State’ is of profound concern and is perceived as a return of oppression. This pessimistic situation is a repetition of the circumstances following the Egyptian revolution of 1952. This essay will explore the effects of colonisation on subjectivity, effects that have been profoundly internalised in Egypt, despite the arguments or pleas that assert the opposite. By focusing on exploring identification and inter-generational transmission I aim to draw out how history persists in the present and how the weight of the past paralyses the possibility of forging a future based on social justice and equality of opportunity. The essay focuses on issues of identification and generational transmission in order to look at how a colonised past persists relentlessly in the present.

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