Sean Rocha

Latest in the battle over the Mohamed Mahmoud mural

As soon as I heard that they had destroyed the exquisite street art in Cairo that ran along Mohamed Mahmoud Street off Tahrir and celebrated the post-revolutionary martyrs, I wrote a post about it and included the photographs I’d taken two weeks ago documenting the entire length of it.  The thing was really amazing so do check out those photographs — you can find them here (it will open in a separate window).  Today, Robert Mackey at the New York Times blog The Lede picked up my post, along with ones from Soraya Morayef and Zeinobia, and included it in his story about the ongoing battles between the police and street artists in Cairo — I am mentioned about half-way down and the whole thing is worth reading. In fairness, it should be said that most of the photographs shown there in Zeinobia’s embedded Flickr slideshow are a little old so by the time the mural was destroyed a couple days ago it looked quite different; in particular, it had a huge Arabic text overlay in support of the elections. Morayef has been following that mural (and street art in the Middle East generally) closely so this post, which includes before and after pictures and translations of the principal text on the wall, is especially valuable for understanding what was just destroyed.

But the most interesting component of The Lede’s post is this video by Mosireen, which starts by documenting the whitewashing of the mural and then captures the revolutionaries starting to cover it again in graffiti practically before the paint dried.  Maybe there’s hope yet.

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Click here to read all my posts on Egypt, the Middle East or street art.  Click here to see my photographs of the Mohamed Mahmoud mural or street art around the world.

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Update (24 Sep): A reader pointed me to this report from Al Jazeera about the making of the mural which includes brief interviews with a couple of the artists:

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2012 at 8:28 pm. It is filed under That is Genius and tagged with art, Cairo, Egypt, Middle East, North Africa, politics, revolution, street art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.