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.
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