Review: Mikala Hyldig Dal (ed.),Cairo: Images of Transition – Perspectives on Visuality in Egypt 2011–2013

This edited volume offers a perspective on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the context of Egypt’s transitional period (2011–2013), as image politics and visual expression played a central role in all its stages. The rise of social disturbance initiated with the revolution demanding the dismissal of the former president Hosnik Mubarak, on 25 January 2011, heightened the political concerns with aesthetic features. The increasing number of nationalist statements, symbolic and emblematic affirmations in graffiti, all sorts of public illustrations, and socially engaged performances is significant during this period. This evidences how the political process of transition in Egypt relied on visuality, showing how images operated as a tool for exercising power by politicians and institutions influencing people to vote, as well as by people to resist and change the establishment.

Mikala Hyldig Dal is a visual artist, writer, independent curator, and lecturer at the German University in Cairo. Between 2011 and 2013 she initiated a research project on political campaigning which ‘the book is [the] subsequent result of’ (p. 9). The relations between image-making, iconoclasm, and political processes are a guiding line of inquiry in a book that unites social processes of change, visual politics, and academic research. The 55 contributors include visual artists, doctoral students, filmmakers, professors, photographers, comic artists and illustrators, product designers, writers, and lecturers. The book’s images are from the authors or from Cairo Image Archive (imageatals.org/).

The fundamental idea of the book is to provide a ‘temporary record’ of Egypt’s dynamically changing history ‘still in the writing’ through the mapping of the visual transformations occurring in Cairo’s public space through shifting media and modes of representation (graffiti, outdoor photos, and other street art forms), revealing the transformations on the urban landscape and city’s surfaces ‘in an all-encompassing editing process’ (p. 7). The appearance and aesthetic concept of the book attempts to reflect this process in a captivating way by adding comments and handwritten notes to its visual conception, offering supplementary references to its primary textual matter.

The book organized in three chapters – (1) ‘Meta-image Tahir,’ (2) ‘Politics of representation,’ and (3) ‘Urban transformations.’ It presents a range of expressions: ‘the established Egyptian professional who has been reflecting on developments in the region for decades; the Egyptian student for whom the 25 January raised the first significant opportunity to reflect on his/her work politically; and representatives of a well-travelled international community of artists and writers in permanently impermanent residence in various cultural spheres’ (p. 7). It first demonstrates how people used images as a place of resistance; then it shows how political candidates used images as a tool to influence the voters, demonstrating its potential to exercise control, in addition to its function of minimizing the effects of illiteracy in a large segment of Egyptian society; finally, it reveals the vital importance of understanding social interaction within the context of the urban landscape during that period.

Chapter 1, ‘Meta-image Tahir’ (pp. 14–123), addresses the modes of production, distribution, and instrumentalization of images representing revolutionary movements, and ultimately establishing Tahir as an icon of common reference in the global imaginary (p. 8), enhancing the potential of images as discourses of (counter) power, i.e., how dissident discourses of change were constructed through visuality in the urban space and through collective gathering between 28 January and 5 February 2011 (p. 16). It illuminates the reciprocal influence between political developments and their visual representations, and the effects of visualization on the agents of representation affecting sensory perception and social behavior, namely, through technological advancements such as integrating image recording technologies in mobile communication devices: it is ‘evident the immense impact and powerful images the revolution generated and was, [partially] generated by. Each moment is a potential picture, and each picture a potential opportunity for constructing and manifesting social identity [and] political stands’ (p. 16).

This chapter also addresses the way protestors and activists became aware that their protests were ‘becoming image’ remembering Susan Sontag’s (1977) and Roland Barthes’s (1981) analogies between the camera and the loaded gun (p. 17). In this process, protestors and activists started to stage themselves with handmade English-language posters, therefore providing their own image captions for foreign media, besides having installed a big screen in Tahir Square to display live-streaming images of the protests as they were happening. It was like Tahir Square had ‘become a stage’ wherein the screen had ‘become a mirror’ and the protestors had ‘become actors’ (p. 36).

Finally, the chapter exposes the attempts to erase this power of awareness by police ‘eye snipers,’ i.e., they started shooting the eyes of citizen journalists as the images display intensified. Thus, the notion of ‘blindness’ became a metaphor for the intense power struggle over visual representation observed (p. 8). ‘Blindness’ was used symbolically to reduce information bias, disrupt sight, and destruct the capacity of seeing (i.e., reasoning).

Chapter 2, ‘Politics of representation’ (pp. 126–229), presents an outline of the visual communication used in parliamentary and presidential election campaigns. It unveils the vivid iconization of the election campaigns (2011–2012) by analyzing the aesthetics of the political posters, banners, and graffiti images, ranging from their graphic styles, pictorial techniques, and symbolism to the artistic appropriations and performances occurring in public spaces, addressing how these informal interventions opened a parallel discourse devoted to scrutinizing, commenting on, or rethinking the democratic processes.

The chapter addresses how categories of gender, secular, or religious affiliations and socioeconomic features created the divisions of the competitors’ representation; the way candidates transformed revolutionary ties into election slogans; and the question of visual literacy, e.g., the way people’s illiteracy advocated for the use of symbols recognized as strong, nationalistic, or revolutionary (according to each candidate’s political ideology). The idea was that voters could identify with those symbols and the corresponding ideologies through a ‘feast of semiotic associations’ reproduced by various techniques of depiction (p. 126), which would affect people’s polling decisions. Thus, the chapter shows how the non-neutrality of symbols allows a producer or artist to play with the cognitive construction of a visual message regarding its public perception.

Election symbols did not happen by chance, but were chosen by the candidates, who generally preferred strong symbols of pride (e.g., an eagle), virility (e.g., a horse), or progress (e.g., a ladder), along with other icons and colors representing national identity (e.g., the Egyptian flag; p. 128), as well as varying degrees of visibility of female representations (p. 157). Overall, it demonstrates how voting decisions can be influenced by interpretation processes that go from the identification of symbols with certain values or instrumental uses (pp. 155–156) to much deeper processes of emotional response (e.g., p. 172).

Nonetheless, the election campaign sparked a number of artistic and public interventions that were slowly transforming the original visual materials through an ongoing editing process (e.g., adding handwritten comments, removing posters, or blinding unpopular candidates). Messages were continuously subverted by people, gradually changing the landscape of the city (as noted above, some pages of the book provide a slight sense of this by offering the sensory experience of looking through the handwriting, scratches, dashes, and circles that had been added to the original materials).

The essential point is how these transmutations affected the readability of political messages in functional, aesthetic, and semiotic ways, the social and political process of transition in Egypt, and Cairo’s public sphere in collective and spatial terms.

Chapter 3, ‘Urban transformations’ (pp. 232–277), shows how the nonlinear and interactive narrative of the city, manifested on the walls of governmental buildings, underground metro passages, clothes, bodies, and ‘even in the dirt on the ground,’ affected the relations among language, space, and body, and framed the terms of social interaction and changed the definitions of public space and collective assembly (p. 233).

The revolution in Egypt demonstrated the confrontational capacity of the people, to question the symbolic function of the politics of representation and the role of aesthetic features during such a critical moment of metaphorical entrenchment. Expressing subjective dispositions, aesthetic public manifestations reflected and reacted to the culture around them, grounded in an intersubjective urban space, relying on the changing society and its values. In Egypt, the art of graffiti became performative (p. 265), functioning as a democratic model of communication by allowing the public to actively engage in it. Between 2011 and 2013, it became a sophisticated form of applied art, driving political discussion and communication among citizens at the street level (p. 268).

Overall, in academic terms, this book offers and consolidates a perspective on the visual landscape of the transitional period in Egypt (2011–2013), and points to the critical need for more investigations of the politics of visual communication, and to the fluidity of the image as a communicative tool, testimony, and agent for change, putting it at the center of scientific thought in different disciplines (e.g., political science, visual sociology, architecture, urban studies, discourse, media and communication studies, visual anthropology, or cultural studies).