Egyptian-Lebanese visual artist Bahia Shehab has become the first Arab woman to ever receive the\u00a0UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture for her innovative use of Arabic calligraphy in street art.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, will award the 14th edition of the UNESCO Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture to an Egyptian artist, Bahia Shehab, the first woman from the Arab region to receive this award,\u201d UNESCO said in a statement a week ago.<\/p>\n
As an artist, designer and art historian,\u00a0Shehab\u00a0has worked for many years on integrating ancient Arabic script into the modern context for use in graphic design and Arab visual culture.\u00a0The UNESCO-Sharjah\u00a0Prize for Arab Culture acknowledged her project, \u2018No, A Thousand Times No,\u2019 which is an art installation that became a graffiti series centered on the one thousand different ways to say \u201cno\u201d in Arabic.<\/p>\n
\u201cHer artistic work in graffiti brings to the forefront issues pertaining to political and economic injustices, as well as personal issues and gender-based violations, reflecting her conviction that art is a tool for change that can provoke people to leave their comfort zone and engage in action for justice, \u201cthe UNESCO statement added.<\/p>\n
The spark behind Shehab\u2019s project lit when she was invited as an artist\u00a0to participate in an exhibition commemorating\u00a0100 years of Islamic art in Europe.\u00a0The curator behind the exhibition had only one condition- to use the Arabic script as a theme for her artwork.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs an artist, a woman, an Arab,\u00a0or a human being living in the world in 2010,\u00a0I only had one thing to say:\u00a0I wanted to say no.\u00a0And in Arabic, to say “no,” we say “no,\u00a0and a thousand times no,\u201d she said during a TED Talk back in 2012.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I decided to look for a thousand different nos on everything ever produced\u00a0under Islamic or Arab patronage in the past 1,400 years,\u00a0from Spain to the borders of China,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Nine months after the January 25 revolution, Shehab found herself spraying messages\u00a0across Tahrir Square and around Cairo\u2019s streets. Her graffiti images portrayed everything she stood up against during the revolution, refusing to live in a country where people are being killed\u00a0and thrown like garbage on the street.<\/p>\n
Her first artwork was seen in Cairo streets when she took one “no” off a tombstone from\u00a0the Islamic Museum in Cairo, and added a message to it saying, “no to military rule,\u201d which later led onto a series of \u201cNo\u201d coming out of her like ammunition.<\/p>\n
Eager to further send her message across, Shehab sprayed messages like \u201cNo to a new Pharaoh, because whoever comes next\u00a0should understand that we will never be ruled by another dictator,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Even more, she continued to spray \u201cNo to blinding heroes, after Ahmed Harara lost his right eye\u00a0on the 28th of January,\u00a0and he lost his left eye on the 19th of November,\u00a0by two different snipers, and No to burning books,\u201d after the Institute of Egypt was burned\u00a0on December 17,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The award ceremony of the Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture\u00a0will take place on 18 April at UNESCO\u2019s Headquarters in Paris.<\/p>\n
She is currently an associate professor of professional practice at the American University in Cairo.<\/p>\n
She is set to receive the prize along with French artist, eL Seed, for his unique pictorial style in calligraffiti that mixes poetry, calligraphy and graffiti and disseminates messages of peace and beauty perceptible even to those unable to decipher Arabic writing.<\/p>\n
Established in 1998, the\u00a0UNESCO-Sharjah\u00a0Prize for Arab Culture awards those whose achievements promote a greater understanding of Arab art and culture as part of UNESCO\u2019s greater mission to foster cross-cultural exchange. Two laureates are selected each year by the director-general of UNESCO, with recommendations from a jury of experts in the field of Arab art and culture.<\/p>\n
Egypt Independent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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