



1 / 25 Chevron Chevron Before the revolution, political expression in Egypt was stifled…

Amid the cacophony of protest and debate since the revolution—which I wrote about for the magazine this week—there has been one method of expression that has regularly stopped me in the middle of Cairo traffic so that I can get out my iPhone camera: graffiti. (See the slide show above.) It’s suddenly all over Cairo, on schools, on telephone exchange boxes, on empty walls and corrugated fencing around building sites. Daubs of slogans, finely rendered panoramas of Tahrir Square, and, increasingly, the kind of biting satire and subversion that Banksy made famous.

One afternoon I went to see Ganzeer, one of the better known street artists. (There’s also Keiser, whose images include a lightbulb going off and a parade of ants, and Sad Panda, who, as the name suggests, paints dejected panda bears all over the place.) Ganzeer means “bicycle chain,” but his images go well beyond that. I found him at home, underneath a bushy Egyptian fro and wearing a pair of paint-spattered Adidas sneakers. He lives in a clean, white-washed apartment, and we sat on a sofa opposite his a work bench holding the tools of his trade: a stencil of Mubarak, a MacBook, and a pencil sharpener. Ganzeer is a graphic designer by day. “I don’t consider myself a street artist; it’s just that certain things say they should be on the street,” he told me.

We talked about the rise of street art in Cairo. Ridicule is an important part of breaking down the fear barrier in a revolution, he said, which no doubt accounts in part for the flourishing of the form. Another purpose of the graffiti is commemoration. Although many of the images reflect the current debate, they also offer a way to revisit what happened in Tahrir in February.

Ganzeer trades in both. He is particularly famous for his series of portraits of martyrs of the revolution, painted big and graphic in red and yellow, but he has gotten attention recently for a cartoon about the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, which shows a figure gagged and blindfolded with the caption “Mask of Freedom: A Gift from SCAF to our beloved sons of our homeland… Currently in stock for an unlimited period!” At every Friday protest on the square, I seem to see someone wearing a big bright yellow T-shirt with the image.

A few weeks ago Ganzeer was arrested for putting up “Mask of Freedom” stickers downtown. The police officers didn’t quite know what to do with him, and ended up driving him around for several hours and having a long political discussion. Ganzeer told me it had been fun to challenge the police face to face. Eventually, he managed to convince them that he hadn’t been disrupting the peace—that, as he described it to me, “we were not evil people, that we have the country’s interests at heart, but at the same time they have different opinions.” He sighed, reflecting on the times and the culture gap between hip youth and government employees. “So you get into a discussion and nothing is really resolved. We’re just from completely opposite ends of the spectrum.”

By the time the police had deposited Ganzeer at the military prosecution center, the Twitterati had gone crazy over his arrest. He was released without charge. I asked him what the Army officers had made of his “Mask of Freedom.” He told me they were more amused than anything. He had five left on him at the time, which were confiscated. Three were placed very carefully in an evidence envelope and sealed with wax; the other two, he told me, laughing, the investigating officer kept for himself.