Archival critique and activism: memory, preservation, and digital visual cultures in post-revolutionary Egyptian heterotopias

Abstract

Many might argue that the prospects of a progressive politics and democratic governance that the 2011 Egyptian revolution sought to realize have completely vanished. Those revolutionary aspirations for social change, political justice, economic opportunity, or civic equality have disintegrated, for some, into disillusioned desperations. In turn, recent cultural discourse about Egypt’s post-revolutionary malaise has often been couched in terms of “dystopia.” However, this paper posits that Egyptian artists are testing the limits of their creative expression, experimenting to give rise to alternative heterotopias. Specifically, this paper examines how two contemporary artists, Lara Baladi and Ganzeer, wrestle with the archives and memories of the 2011 Egyptian revolution to visually, digitally theorize and reconstitute its political resonance, salience and urgency. Through digital and graphic media, Cairo-based and diasporic Egyptian artists alike continue to ruminate on the country’s present stagnation all while keeping a pulse on the potential for a future revolutionary resurgence.

Keywords:

• revolution
• Egypt
• Arab Spring
• digital media
• visual art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Now numerous Egyptian street artists, including Sampsa and Ganzeer, face the accusation of being “terrorists.” These artists believe that they are being held to the microscope because the regime perceives that the street art was a “catalyst” in the revolution (Mallonee). That lavishly illustrated book was deemed to be such a menace to society that it has been driven out of print.

2 Two examples of such exhibitions are those of “The Future of a Promise,” curated by Lina Lazaar for the 54^th Venice Biennale in 2011 or “Plot for a Biennial,” curated by Suzanne Cotter for the 10^th Sharjah Biennial in 2011.

3 Khaled Said was a young man accused of drug use, who was subsequently brutally mutilated and tortured to death by the Egyptian police in Alexandria in June 2010, resulting in a public outpouring of empathetic support with the statement, “kulina Khaled Said,” or “All of us are Khaled Said.”

4 Elmahdy now lives in Sweden, where she was granted asylum.

5 In Baladi’s praxis, I see theoretical, avant-garde echoes of the Dadaist Hannah Höch and her political critique of Weimar Germany, specifically in her photocollage piece Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, from 1919 to 1920.

Additional information

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Nancy Demerdash

Nancy Demerdash is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at Albion College (Michigan, USA), where she teaches a range of courses in global visual culture and art and architectural history. She holds graduate and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University, respectively, and publishes widely on modern and contemporary art and architecture of the Middle East and North Africa. Her articles have appeared in edited volumes as well as in journals such as the Journal of North African Studies, the Journal of Arabian Studies, Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art, among others. Her current book manuscript examines modernist architecture, urbanism and the discourses of development in late colonial and early independent Tunisia.