Another multifaceted Shehab project, At the Corner of a Dream, began as a series of murals inspired by lines from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, which Shehab painted in locations around the world (while also spraying “noes”—"no to borders,” “no to violence”). The title of the series comes from a Darwish line that can be translated as “Stand at the corner of the dream and fight.” Shehab eventually created a video installation of the same name and documented the project in the volume At the Corner of a Dream: A Journey of Resistance and Revolution (Gingko Library, 2019).
Recently, during COP27, the United Nations climate conference held in Egypt in November of 2022, Shehab created an immersive, experiential installation titled Heaven and Hell in the Anthropocene, in which thousands of participants filled out a “gamebook,” making choices based on fictional scenarios to determine which of the two “scenarios of eternity” they would visit: a room representing comfort, freshness, and beauty; or a hot, dark, and uncomfortable room. This installation was based on Shehab's interest in “visceral fit,” or the way our current living conditions, including ambient temperature, affect our views on climate change. I had a chance to speak to Shehab, via Zoom call, to ask about her activism, her ephemeral site-specific artwork, and her work as an art and design historian, just as this installation was wrapping up.
—Heather Green
First, I wanted to say congratulations on your recent installation Heaven and Hell in the Anthropocene, in the Green Zone at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt.
Thank you, I’m very lucky. It was very well received, and by different audiences. It was quite interesting to see that university professors, university presidents, ambassadors, climate activists, educators, security guys, the gardeners, the people who came from the city, different families, children, schools, and more all visited, and it was nice to see that the unanimous reaction was that they really got the message and what the artwork is about.
That’s wonderful that it reached so many different groups of people who were coming to the conference and living in Cairo. I wonder whether you could talk a bit about the concept of “visceral fit,” which I found so fascinating, and how that idea played into the creation of the installation?
Actually, the local audience is not Cairene. They’re from Sharm el-Sheikh, so it’s a touristic city, not the metropolis. It’s an even more challenging kind of audience. So that confirms, going back to your question, the fact that it’s a visceral experience. It didn’t matter where people came from—maybe a less sophisticated background or a less sophisticated metropolis—the reactions were very interesting because they would walk in with this answer sheet knowing that they now have to go to room one or room two, and they would ask me, “Where’s that?” I didn’t have clear numbers on purpose, so they had to ask, “Where is room one?” I would tell them, “Go left or go right,” and they had no idea what their score indicated. There was also the fear factor of “am I going to heaven, or am I going to hell?” And they walk in, whichever it is, they walk out, and they look at me, and they say: “I don’t get it.” So, I say, “Now, it’s time to walk into the other room,” and I ask them to switch rooms, and then they walk out and say, “I get it.”
It was fascinating. It was really like magic, because all ages, all backgrounds—they walk out, and they say, “That’s it? It’s an empty room.” And I say, “Go to the other room, please.” And then, because they feel the temperature, and they see the light, and they hear the music, and they smell—it’s a multi-sensory experience—it doesn’t take a lot of explaining. As educators, we tend to sit and explain. But the topic is urgent and I do not feel that we have the luxury of time now. We need to educate fast. We need to communicate with people in new ways, more efficient and faster ways.
There were a few who came out still not getting it. I’m not saying it was dummy proof, but a big number of the people who were being, let’s say, surveyed—because it was a kind of a social experiment for me also, being there and seeing more than three thousand people in and out—I think the majority understood the indication of climate change physically.
You mentioned smell, and I know you worked with a scent designer to create part of the environment, an unusual element in an art installation. I was curious about what that process was like.
It was a very interesting process because I used my students as my survey group. I’m teaching a class at the university, and I had twenty students in a studio, so I used them as a focus group. The scent designer Noor Sallam, an alum of our design program at AUC (The American University in Cairo), was given keywords related to what we were looking for. Heaven is pleasant, it’s natural, it’s refreshing, it’s calming. She designed the first batch and came into the classroom, and we asked students to smell and whisper to us how they felt when they smelled this. And it was very curious, because the first hell batch reminded students of their grandfathers, of hospitals, of disturbing things. But it was not annoying. It did not really get on their nerves, and so we had to fix that. Heaven was refreshing. It was pleasant. With heaven, we got it on the first try. With hell, we needed to work harder to get the scents right.
When I read the description of the mix of elements that you had in the hell scent, I felt like I would really need to experience it to even comprehend what it would smell like.
Yeah. But the most interesting discovery that I found is that at forty-five degrees Celsius, the scent evaporates. You smell nothing. So, I had to spray it at the door so that people walking in smell it as they enter. I’m still looking at that: how to create a horrible smell that lasts in a high temperature room. That’s still part of my fixing of the experiment. How do we create horrible smells in a hot environment and not have a physical object present in the room? Because the perfume evaporates and the scents disappears, no matter how much I use. I even spilled half a bottle in the hot room, and it was as if I’d put nothing. It just goes away because of the heat.
Interesting. That brings up another question I have: are you planning to replicate this experiment, and have the installation appear elsewhere in the future?
Yes, so the first place is AUC. We’re going to be launching it in March, because the President and our AUC leadership team and the community are excited about it as an educational tool. But more interesting for me than the actual artwork are the teachers who came and asked for a simpler version for their classroom. So, this is the next step. We are trying to design a rendition of the artwork that is more accessible to teachers and maybe lower-income communities. I had a teacher who told me, “Yes, and I also need it mobile, because I work with refugee camps, and I would like to take this along.”
The artwork itself is open source, and we are providing all the data. For those who need guidance, we’ll provide it, but we won’t take the actual installation to travel because it costs money to move things and set them up. We will be providing a DIY version for teachers and the greater community, kind of “solutions on the go,” so that they can use it in any classroom or any room, or they can create a makeshift, cheaper version of the whole experience.
Oh, I love that! And I love the sustainable idea of recreating it in place rather than moving a whole room and tons of supplies around the world. Related to your environmental and open-source work, I wanted to ask about the garbage pyramid. Is that a separate but tangentially related piece?
This artwork was initiated in 2020, with the TED Countdown, which is a global attempt to bring world leaders together so we can cut down our carbon emissions by fifty percent by 2030—a very audacious project. They put out a call, and they asked for submissions, and I was one of the ten artists selected to create an artwork for that event.
I submitted a concept, which was pyramids of garbage. The idea was that Egypt has left humanity with thousands of years of culture, and I hope that we do not leave humanity with pyramids of garbage. This was built in Cairo in 2020. It was built in the garbage collectors’ area in Cairo, and it was dismantled in a few days, but the image and the message traveled all around the world. The physicality of the project didn’t matter because the idea was already documented.
This year, I was approached by Zero Co, an Australian sustainability products company, and they wanted to replicate the pyramid in Egypt in parallel with COP, and so I told them, “Yes, you can, free of charge. You can copy the idea, do whatever you want, because the pyramid is also an open-source project.” Anybody can replicate it anywhere they want.
They came, they did a Nile River clean up, and using that garbage, they built another pyramid similar to my idea, to promote their “100YR” ocean cleanup project. They used the pyramid as a launching idea for their campaign. I did not build the pyramid this time, but I was consulted as they engineered its structure so that they could build it with the new dimensions they had in mind.
The images of both your original pyramid and the new one are quite arresting, and I was especially intrigued that they came and found all of this garbage by doing a Nile cleanup project, because the size of it is incredible. Thank you. I love that you’ve created these projects that other people can pick up and run with. There’s something about that spirit of generosity that seems to really connect with your activist approach to art.
I’m comfortable in that area. I was really never comfortable in the gallery spaces. I think art belongs on the street. It belongs to the people. I’m not undermining the value of the white cube, or the value of the museum, and very important conversations take place in these spaces, but I really think that people on the street desperately need art. And I feel that culture is a basic need. It’s not really a luxury. If we can make art accessible, then why not?
That brings to mind your murals. But maybe it makes sense to go further back first and talk about the inception of your project A Thousand Times No.
They’re all linked in a way, and I feel like this is normal, because I’ve had this question from someone before: when did you start doing experiential environmental art? And I think of the Heaven and Hell project as a culmination of my artistic—but also my educational—skill set, because I came in also as an educator, not just as an artist, and because I am trying to communicate an urgent message.
The installation A Thousand Times No started in 2010, before the Egyptian revolution. It was a political statement that I could not make in my part of the world, that I made in Germany, in Munich. The curator had one condition, that I needed to use Arabic, and because I knew my audience did not speak Arabic, I said, “I’ll just say one word. I’ll say ‘no’ one thousand times in different ways.”
And so, after that project went down—the same month actually, January of 2011—the revolution in Egypt started. And I started—nine months after initially documenting them—spraying the different “noes” on the street. Since then, I’ve written two books about this, because there was a lot to deal with. It was overwhelming, it was invigorating, it was refreshing. It was beautiful to be on the street, connecting with millions of people, sharing ideas, and feeling like the city belonged to us. But then none of those dreams materialized. And so here we go back to where we started.
We say the city is no longer our city, and we feel completely alienated with everything that’s going on here. And so, I started painting the murals in different parts of the world, because I said if Cairo is not my city, then the rest of the world is my city, and if I can’t express myself in Cairo, I can express myself anywhere that receives me. I started painting the different murals of poetry and also spraying “no” in every city I went to. They might look on the surface like they’re different mediums, like walls versus installations versus experiential. But to me they are a continuation of the same idea: How do you create social change using art?
Yes, I really see that fluidity between them, and I also wanted to ask—there are so many things I want to ask you, based on everything you just said—but one of them is: You have so many different disciplines that you work in as a historian and archivist, working in and drawing on archives as a writer, a professor, and as an artist who has worked in the white cube space and as a street artist. And I was wondering if you could talk about how the A Thousand Times No project related to your archival work and to your work on A History of Arab Graphic Design? I’m also wondering about how those design elements played into the murals that you made with lines from Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry.
Yes, thank you. I really appreciate the fact that you can see and trace the connections. Definitely, A Thousand Times No builds on my interest in the archives, and my interest in history being a representation of identity. I had just finished a master’s degree in Islamic art and architecture at the time, in 2009, and I came out into the world, and I started looking at our cultural heritage, and feeling more and more depressed about the lack of archives and the state of the cultural heritage we had. Partly, A Thousand Times No was a retaliation against that, too. And I did look at archival data in Islamic art history to find the thousand different renditions of the same letter, dating them, placing them within a geography, all that was important. And the bigger message that they gave when they’re placed together on one wall was also very important.
That led into questions about history and why, having studied as a young woman in Beirut, having studied the history of graphic design from a Eurocentric point of view, I always wondered, “What are our designers like? Why aren’t they there? Why is there nothing about Arab design? Do we not have design?” But I’d look around me, and I’d see design. There’s somebody doing this. I realized that when we don’t have a history book, it’s not because we don’t have a history; it’s simply because nobody wrote it. So, I took it upon myself to initiate the process of writing this history that did not exist, in collaboration with Haytham Nawar.
We got a grant, and we started looking at and interviewing different designers who were alive and collecting data about the designers we found. We collected the work of over eighty Arab designers from Morocco to Iraq, and the book was published in 2020 by AUC press. It has been very well received, and I humbly say it is now a cornerstone for the canon on Arab design. I’m so proud of this project because it has opened the eyes of so many people about the state of Arab design, and also the potential of Arab design and designers. It kind of brought the community together. We got so many letters just saying, “This is the book we always knew we wanted and didn’t know existed.”
We’ve had some really very good reviews, and I think it’s in its second print run now, but then there was a shortcoming for me. I was quite ashamed to confess, in one of the public presentations, that there were only five women designers in the book. I was in a Zoom call for one of the book launches last year, and I said, “I’m sorry, but I have to apologize for the fact that we don’t have enough women designers in this book. My next book is going to be about Arab women designers.” One of my publishers, Huda Abifares founder of the Khatt Foundation, was online, and she said, “Are you sure?” I said, “Yes, I’m sure.” And she said, “Okay, we’re going to do this.” She went ahead and got us a grant in January of 2022. We are four women designers: I’m in Egypt; Yasmine Nachabe Taan is in Beirut; Soukeina Hachem is in Morocco; and Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès is in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Each of us picked themes, and we conducted six online panels, each of them with a different group of women designers from the Arab world. The book is coming out next spring! We have more than eighty-five women designers in the book, and their ages range from twenty-five to seventy.
That is so exciting. Congratulations! I wanted to ask about the form of the book within your work. For Asymptote’s visual section, we’ve been focusing on work that’s at the intersection of multiple languages and art. And your work crosses that intersection in many different ways. I’m always interested in how an exhibition becomes a book or a book becomes an exhibition. But in your case, I wanted to just ask if you might say a bit about your most recent book, You Can Crush the Flowers, which documents some of the street art of the Egyptian revolution. I think your introduction to that book is very moving, as it conceives of the eighteen days of the Egyptian revolution as individual rooms in a museum. I believe the title also comes from a translation of a line of poetry by Pablo Neruda: “You can crush the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring.” I was wondering if you could say a bit about the book and how you came to put that together.
Yes, thank you. I wrote At the Corner of a Dream because I couldn’t write You Can Crush the Flowers at the time, and I wanted to document the murals. But also, I wanted to tell the story of the revolution, and I knew I couldn’t. And during COVID, I feel that we all looked in the mirror. It was the ten-year anniversary of the revolution. And I felt I would not respect myself if I didn’t document the story, and at least leave the document for future generations. Even if the stories now are being suppressed, I have to leave a document for the future. We went through all of these emotions. They were raw. They were real. We really tried to create change, and we can’t let systematic erasure of our history just happen, even though it’s very challenging. We don’t sell the book in Cairo for security reasons, but my publisher was crazy enough to accept, and even though everybody said this is not something you want to do, I felt like it needed to be published.
So, for the ten-year anniversary of the Revolution, I published You Can Crush the Flowers: A Visual Memoir of the Egyptian Revolution, where I documented my street art, which no longer exists on the street—it has been all erased—and that of my fellow street artists, some whom I really respect, and whose work was quite impactful in my creative process. We were looking at each other’s work and getting inspired by each other. To me, this was an important story that really needed to be told. To go back to your comment about archives, to me books are archives, and there is a lack of archives when there is no infrastructure for us to retain and protect knowledge. Books, unfortunately written in a foreign language, are now the safest way for me to make sure that at least part of the story survives somewhere on a shelf with someone, so that the learning doesn’t disappear, and the dreams don’t disappear, and the tears and the blood that were shed on the streets in this country are not wasted, do not go undocumented.
Thank you. That’s such important work, and I hope someday it will be available in your region. You mentioned At the Corner of a Dream, and something I found most fascinating about this project is the way it has multiple manifestations: there are murals around the world drawn from lines of Darwish, presented in your own highly stylized and designed Arabic calligraphy, and you’ve also created digital installations that express this work in a new medium. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about these different layers of that project. I know you’ve already mentioned a little bit about why you decided to become a more global artist. But I would love to hear more about how this project evolved.
Yes. Thank you again for your really insightful questions, for looking at the work and exploring it. To me it was also important in that, as much as I value the street conversation, sometimes it lacks continuity. It can be interrupted, it can be suppressed, and it can be erased. It can be manipulated, even. And so, telling the story of these worlds, and of the struggle—the bigger struggle even of the Palestinian people who are struggling every day, for more than seventy years—bringing this narrative into the white cube in a university in London, and translating across mediums—I think the point I was trying to make in that exhibition is that ideas are bigger than mediums. A poem can become a wall, can become a video installation, can become a dance.
And we did that, actually, in Antwerp. The last wall I painted, pre-COVID in 2019, we had a dancer who came and interpreted the poem that I was painting into a dance, and they danced it while we were launching the wall in Antwerp. So, the medium doesn’t matter as long as the core and the idea is there. And this kind of also highlights the idea that you can’t put walls around ideas—that they are free to travel, not just from mind to mind, but from medium to medium, from country to country, from gallery to street, from street to wall. So it’s also demonstrating the freedom of an idea.
That’s so beautifully put. And really apt for this journal, which focuses on translation and ways language can be free to traverse political borders or national boundaries. In your case, ideas and images have that freedom. I was wondering if you wanted to talk about the connection between poetry and your work, more generally. I know there’s this deep history of a connection between Arabic calligraphy and poetry.
Yes, I was saying that poetry is another medium of expression for me. And so, being an artist who is not interested necessarily in sticking to one medium of expression, whether painting or installations, what’s important to me is the concept. I view poetry as another medium that is available to me, and so I use it when I need to. But in terms of visual expressions of poetry, which are the murals that I painted—and this responds to a question that you asked before and I didn’t have a chance to answer—I’m always, in my murals, trying to reinterpret what Arabic calligraphy looks like.
If you look at my murals, they don’t necessarily look like classical Arabic. I’m really trying to break away from how Arabic has been penned for the past fourteen hundred years. I feel like in the past few hundred years there has been a stagnation in the way Arabic is expressed visually, and I’m trying to push the boundaries of how you modernize Arabic. On every wall, I try to draw Arabic as circles, squares, triangles, or pixelated. I remember the wall in Norway, in Stavanger—one of the reporters told me, “Oh, I didn’t know you could do a pixelated Arabic,” and I was thinking, “Yes, you can!” Arabic is quite flexible, actually.
I’m pushing the boundaries, and also painting Arabic in countries where Arabic is not spoken as a main language, or spoken or even understood on the streets, so people just look at colors and forms and shapes, and they don’t necessarily see it as Arabic or understand. But the few curious ones will know the story. There’s also always a plaque that we leave on the wall for people to read more or learn more. The visual expression of Arabic and pushing the boundaries of what it looks like through poetry has been an important exercise for me.
One of the things that I’ve wondered about as I looked at the many different elements of your work is this paradox between ephemerality and documentation or archiving. It seems like so much of your work lives at one extreme or the other: being extremely ephemeral or being very focused on a permanent structure or a book. I was wondering how you see your work relating to time. And do you think that being situated in the Arab world gives you any particular perspectives on time and history?
That’s a very interesting question—how time is perceived—because time is relative, and I have always felt like we don’t have a lot of time. Because of my background, having lived through the civil war in Lebanon, having lived through a revolution in Egypt, I feel like there is an urgency to documentation. I always feel like we’re not doing enough there. There needs to be more done. We’re losing our heritage at an absurd speed, either due to wars, or because of negligence of uninformed governments, or a lack of interest by governments in preserving heritage. And as a historian, I see that unfolding all the time, and so the sense of urgency to protect it has been present for me for a long time.
At the same time, I feel like there’s a responsibility to educate future generations. Time becomes relative, so sometimes it’s urgent like in the revolution. It’s the Now that you need to quickly document because we’re losing it, they’re erasing it, we’re running around the streets. Then, at times, I can take a year to write a book because it’s also urgent in a way. We need to preserve the message.
