https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047317718204

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Introduction

Between 2012 and 2017, a series of street art1 “campaigns” (s. hamla, pl. hamlat) have transformed public spaces in Yemen through artistic expression used to provoke political awareness and mobiliza-tion. Defined as “campaigns,” artistic interventions on the walls of Sana’a have taken place in a collective manner with the objective of identifying subjects of social and political concern. In certain cases, they have provoked changes at the institutional level, having an effect on the population outside of the par-ticipants in the campaigns and triggering other forms of participation and expression of political griev-ances. This use of street art cannot be understood without taking into account the contentious mobiliza-tion that gave place to demonstrations, massive and

long-standing sit-ins, and the ousting from power of former president Ali Abdallah Saleh in 2011.2 Initiated by a self-proclaimed “youth of the revolu-tion” (shabab al-thawra), the occupation of public space through indefinite sit-ins spread throughout the country, adding new faces to a political opposition previously limited to political parties and human rights organizations among other social actors. Gradually, antigovernmental demonstrators came to modify old repertoires of contention,3 such as the

The politics of street art in Yemen (2012–2017)

Anahi Alviso-MarinoFrench Center for Archeology and Social Sciences (CEFAS), Kuwait

AbstractIn 2012, as a continuation of street politics developed in places like the antigovernment sit-in in Change Square in Yemen’s capital Sana’a, a small number of visual artists incorporated dissent, transgression, and civil disobedience into their artistic practices. Such is the case of Murad Subay, the painter who initiated the series of street art campaigns analyzed in this article. This case allows us to study the intersections of space, contentious politics, and artistic practices, interrogating how visual expressions located in the streets reflect a vivid political public sphere, understood as a site of critical debate and interaction. Furthermore, it introduces a series of dynamics that make of these campaigns something more than a site for production and circulation of discourses critical of the state. Street art campaigns in Yemen are thus explored sensitizing devices for political awareness.

KeywordsContentious politics, sensitizing devices, street art, street politics, Yemen

Corresponding author:Anahi Alviso-Marino, French Center for Archeology and Social Sciences (CEFAS), Kuwait. Email: anahialvisomar@gmail.com

718204 CTP0010.1177/2057047317718204Communication and the PublicAlviso-Marinoresearch-article2017

Original Research Article

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demonstration or the temporary sit-in, into what became a permanent camp and a new space of resist-ance at the heart of Sana’a, subsequently named Change Square (saha at-taghyir).

The physical and social space of the streets served as the locus of collective expression, echoing the notion of street politics developed by sociologist Asef Bayat (1997). Furthermore, this sit-in became a political arena where people actively participated in transforming the Square into a sort of parallel city, where a more structured and institutionalized site of discursive interaction developed. This arena effec-tively resonates with the notion of public sphere, elaborated by philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas who studied the emergence, transforma-tion, and disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere through an analysis of coffeehouses in Great Britain and France in 1680 and 1730, respectively. His (Habermas, 1989/2011) study identified these spaces as a sphere between civil society and the state, where informed and critical discourse by the people emerged. Many Middle Eastern countries and the larger Muslim world of many areas have been examined through his analytical approach,4 though not in terms of artistic activity and expression.

Visual artists were also among the shabab al-thawra of a sit-in that lasted through early 2013. Some of these artists exhibited their works inside the Square, photographed life and death in the sit-in, and more generally participated in supporting the popu-lar mobilization. Artistic expression was also notice-able outside the Square, where graffiti and street art techniques such as free writing, mural painting, or stenciling were used throughout 2011 to reproduce political slogans in unauthorized places, aiming to support the overthrow of Saleh’s regime. In various manners, artistic practices contributed to the sym-bolic aspects of this mobilization both inside and outside of Change Square.

In 2012, as a continuation of street politics devel-oped in places such as Change Square, a small number of visual artists incorporated dissent, trans-gression, and civil disobedience into their artistic practices. Such is the case of Murad Subay, the painter who initiated the series of campaigns I ana-lyze in this article. Sending an open call through Facebook in March 2012, he started the first of a

series of artistic actions that initially aimed to “color the walls” of bullet-marked spaces where violent confrontations took place between pacifist demon-strators and forces loyal to the regime. Encouraged by large public participation and media coverage, he undertook other street art campaigns, where a con-tentious discourse and the potential to mobilize peo-ple became more evident. Being among the youth who initiated the sit-in in Sana’a in 2011, his practice serves to explore the implications of direct political participation as well as civil disobedience learned under the tents and expressed through artistic prac-tices that uses both walls and streets as canvases and exhibition spaces that are public, free, and not always subject to prior and official authorization.

This case study focuses on the intersection of space, contentious politics, and artistic practices, interrogating how dissent is expressed through street art rooted in street politics. More specifically, it questions the conditions that allowed street art to encourage political engagement, mobilize people, and provoke instances of collective action5 in Yemen. In this sense, this case shows that visual expressions located in the streets not only reflect a vivid political public sphere understood as a site of critical debate and interaction. Furthermore, it introduces a series of dynamics that make of these campaigns something more than a site for production and circulation of discourses critical of the state.

Foreign media’s description of Subay as the “Yemeni Banksy” is misleading because it stems from the ways that Western street art is often identi-fied in terms of a process of artification, that is, the recognition of graffiti and street art as form of artistic expression with a consequent inclusion in museums, galleries, or markets (Heinich & Shapiro, 2012). This interpretation of Murad Subay’s practice might not coincide with local dynamics of “visibility” and access to social “recognition” (Honneth, 1995). Although the differences of perception are not at the center of this study, it is worth stressing that they highlight the ways in which what is observed interna-tionally as urban and public art is locally used as a sensitizing device (Traïni, 2009). Connecting the study of emotions, collective action, and mobiliza-tion,6 French sociologist Christophe Traïni (2009) defines these types of devices as “all the material

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support, the placement of objects, and the staging techniques that the militants exploit, in order to arouse the kind of affective reactions which predis-pose those who experience them to join or support the cause being defended” (p. 15, Traïni, 2016). As opposed to studying sensitizing devices in a given mobilization, in the following pages, I explore street art as a device used to express issues that become considered as worthy of collectively being shared and denounced, and the potential capacity of mobili-zation that this use of painting on public spaces can have in the short or long term. Having participated in the contentious occupation of public space at Change Square in 2011, Murad Subay’s commitment to street politics and to the revolutionary public sphere deep-ened. My approach is to study his street art cam-paigns as devices that encouraged political action in the period following the ousting of power of former president Saleh.7

Although the study of the contentious movement initiated in 2011 is far beyond the scope of this arti-cle, the political and social learning that took place at the Square remains important to my analysis. The fact that people enhanced their understanding of direct political participation and political action from the street in rejection of institutional politics is cer-tainly an element present in practices such those ana-lyzed in this article. Experiences such as the artistic ones developed by Murad Subay linked the conten-tious street politics learned at Change Square to the transitional period that immediately followed as Saleh resigned in November 2011 and formally left power in February 2012, when former vice pres-ident of the country since 1994 and of Saleh’s party Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi became president. But such artistic actions took place not only during this transitional period, but they also continued as the escalation of violence reached unprecedented levels since the end of 2014, when Huthi rebels launched a military offensive against Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s government. As the military intervention led by Saudi Arabia against the Huthi in March 2015 marked the beginning of the war that is still ongoing in 2017, street art interventions continued to take place in the capital and its surroundings. As I will demonstrate in the following section, using street art techniques, this initiative organized around street art

practices transformed walls, streets, and the city into a territory for collective and participatory experi-ments of an artistic and political nature.

From political uses of street art to aesthetically invested political devices

The myriad of ways in which people practiced par-ticipatory politics in the streets of Change Square were reflected in the transformations taking place in a variety of other fields. Among them, artistic prac-tices were also combined with expressions of politi-cal claims. During 2011, the use of painting and photography reflected an interest mainly centered on the space of the Square, thus serving to support and reiterate slogans enduring the mobilization by sym-bolic means. In other words, these forms of visual expression (especially photography) were mainly used to record life inside the Square reflecting little or no interest in showing what was happening in the rest of the city.8

As the first months of the mobilizations passed, some photographers and bloggers turned their atten-tion to the streets surrounding the Square, which was blanketed gradually by colorful graffiti and free writing used to support the mobilization. Similar to photography or painting, these techniques of street art also contributed to give an artistic expression to political claims. This practice was not unprecedented in Yemen. Before the revolutionary period of 2011, street art techniques had been used in Yemeni cities mainly to reflect religious messages through stencils displaying “God is the greatest” or “there is no God but God” or to reproduce political slogans and sym-bols of political parties. As is the case also in other countries, art was not the first intention of their anonymous performers (Figure 1).9

Two cases stand out in the use of techniques asso-ciated with street art prior to 2011 due to the fact that they involved painters. The first one took place in 2006, when a group of female painters from the coastal city of Hodeidah chose a wall to paint their first collective piece (Alviso-Marino, 2017). This group called “Halat Lawniyya” (“Colored haloes”), composed of five former students of fine arts from the University of Hodeidah, chose the celebration of

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Yemen’s unity on 22 May to unveil a painting col-lectively done on a wall of their city. The second example took place in 2009 in Sana’a, when several painters participated in making mural paintings that they hung on the walls of the old city, using public space to display solidarity with Palestine at a time when Israel renewed attacks on Gaza. In 2010 and 2011, “tags” or signatures aesthetically related to graffiti started to appear in certain walls of Sana’a (Figure 2).

In 2011, these different techniques were being used in the walls nearby Change Square to visually reenact the slogans that were being chanted by the demonstrators. If the walls of cities such as Aden had already been used to make political claims through free writing prior to 2011,10 in Sana’a and around Change Square, these techniques became aestheti-cally more complex. In this vein, the word “irhal” (leave!), largely written on walls, asphalt, and street signs, started to appear written both in Arabic and in English using colorful calligraphy. Fists were

reproduced against bright colors, people’s silhouettes marching in protest and holding the Yemeni flag were painted, and implied references to social media were displayed on the walls. In the context of a movement and a time perceived as revolutionary, issues of ano-nymity appeared less central to a practice otherwise characterized and built around the preservation of an anonymous identity by its European, North and South American practitioners.11 Under the circumstances of open critique and protest, some of the graffiti appeared deliberately signed and dated although most of it, together with the free writing on the walls, was typically anonymous. The street art that appeared in these walls was directly linked to the mobilization and portrayed its political goals through visual means (Figure 3).

In 2012, a series of changes occurred in Yemen’s street art. Between March 2012 and 2017, street art campaigns were launched by a young painter in his twenties through Facebook. The city’s aesthetic was drastically transformed as kilometers of walls ended

Figure 1. “Pray for/on the Prophet,” “God is the greatest,” “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is God’s messenger,” and the horses symbol of Ali Abdallah Saleh’s party, the General People’s Congress, photographed by the author in Sana’a 2009–2010.

Figure 2. Mural paintings hanging in the old city of Sana’a in solidarity with Palestine, 2009, and a tag photographed in 2011. Images by the author.

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up being covered by painting and spray, in the capi-tal Sana’a as well as in other major cities such as Taez and Aden. Most importantly, public space was again being used to express dissent and make social critiques, this time through painting in a collective manner. The practice of techniques related to street art was thus being transformed and singularly trig-gered by the campaigns launched by Murad Subay.

Color the walls of your street: local campaigns and international visibility

A student of English Literature at the University of Sana’a, Murad Subay was born in 1987 in Dhamar. Raised by his mother (his father is a blue-collar worker who emigrated to work in construction in Saudi Arabia), he grew up in his village of Dhamar, and later in Sana’a, and was greatly influenced by his older brothers. In a similar manner as they became interested, respectively, in poetry, writing, and photography, he turned toward the world of arts at the end of his adolescence. As they and his sisters actively participated in contentious politics, through their written or photographic work as well as through demonstrations and inclusion in activist networks related to the defense of human rights and freedom of expression, this environment contributed to Murad’s political socialization. Coming from this

background and living not far from where the dem-onstrations against the regime took place at the beginning of 2011, he participated for the first time in a collective political action through the sit-in of Change Square in Sana’a. He was among the youth who started the sit-in in February 2011, and he quickly volunteered to monitor the entrances in order to avoid arms into the Square.

Subay had been interested in painting from a young age, but until 2012 had never exhibited his work, feeling that he was not ready yet to do so. Although he knows the artistic circles of the city, he does not participate in any of them.12 As a self-taught painter, he mainly practiced on canvases until he started to paint on walls in 2012. As Subay explained, he learned about the techniques of street art through the Internet and identified his projects with this form of expression as it provided him with a “quick and easy way to pass messages to Yemenis and to the world” (M. Subay, personal communication, 9 October 2012 and 24 December 2013). From March 2012 through early 2017, he has worked on five street art projects, which he describes in terms of campaigns.

The first campaign, named “Color the Walls of your Street” (lawun jidar shari‘ak) was launched in March 2012 as a call to color bullet-marked walls where violent clashes occurred in 2011 between the regime and demonstrators. When he started painting

Figure 3. From left to right: “Leave oh killer,” photographed by Abd al Rahman Taha, May 2011. “Leave,” “33 years are enough,” “Get out,” Revolutionaries and “Delete Ali?” courtesy of Jameel Subay, May 2011.

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on the walls of the “Kentki roundabout,” at the crossroad of the streets Zubayri and Da’iri in Sana’a, he did so by reproducing his own paintings, previ-ously confined to canvases. The walls then started to be covered by white hand-shapes painted over a black background or square-shaped faces put together as if they were a collection of puzzle pieces (Figure 4). They were all accompanied by two pieces of information present in pictorial art: the date and the full signature, easily legible, echoing the original canvases. Progressively, his paintings became art works of public access, also inspiring other partici-pants who followed his initiative.

The campaign was a success in which not only painters and those responding to the Facebook announcement participated but also passersby joined them as they painted. Print and TV media were also attracted by what quickly became a collective artistic action, covering the transformation of walls as they were being sprayed and hand painted. Abstract images of giant faces, lists with Yemeni names writ-ten in ancient south Arabian alphabet, and colorful compositions appeared next to paintings that also carried social comments. For instance, a child burn-ing a gun, a simple drawing where a message in English declared “I don’t have a job” (Figure 4) or the word “jobless” written in Arabic highlighted the political impact that artistic expression in public places could have as devices to render people aware of social problems. This use would later be deepened in the subsequent campaigns undertaken by Subay.

For “Color the Walls of your Street,” Subay con-ceived a campaign that was in his understanding a way to distance himself from politics, which he perceived as “disgusting” (qadhara). He wanted to beautify his city at a time when power struggles disgusted him the most and he chose to do so through painting on walls

that could not be politically neutral. As a reminder of the deaths that had occurred against pacifist demon-strators,13 bullet-marked walls were chosen for this campaign in order to embellish the streets while remembering history still in the making. This project effectively distanced Subay from institutional and par-tisan politics but rooted his practice in the street as a site for enacting social and political critique and as a “place of memory of the revolt.”14 Furthermore, he carried out a collective project massively joined as kilometers of walls testified, using public space with-out any authorization.

These elements, as well as the political character of the space chosen, allow us to draw parallels between his artistic practice and his learning of street politics. A year before this first campaign, he partici-pated in a popular mobilization that started using public space also in an unauthorized manner. In 2012, he transformed the political and social capital acquired under the tents of Change Square into an artistic endeavor, inscribing his practice in a “poli-tics from below”15 approach that translated into an “arts from below” campaign. This first campaign also provoked changes in the way painting could be practiced, exhibited, and performed. Contrary to being secluded in a closed space or individually per-formed, paintings were all over the streets fully signed and dated.

The brushes and the sprays used for these paint-ings were temporarily substituted for wheat paste during the summer of 2012. In this instance, Murad Subay carried out a different project where he pasted photographs taken by his brother Jameel Subay. This time he did not post an announcement on Facebook or define his intervention as a “campaign,” but he chose images and walls that were all but politically neutral. The images he enlarged and borrowed from

Figure 4. “Color the Walls of Your Street,” courtesy of Murad Subay.

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his photographer brother were used to show solidar-ity and visually enact social commentary. In fact, Jameel Subay had published or exhibited some of these images in order to question poverty, exclusion and war, and the ways in which attention can be deviated from these issues. By pasting images of such content on the walls of the city, the issues they pointed out acquired a greater visibility in a context that made them all the more pertinent. Learning from the Internet the characteristics of the technique, Murad pasted three photographs: one portraying a street cleaner mostly known as akhdam,16 which served to show solidarity with them at a moment when they undertook a strike (Figure 5). Another representing a man carrying aloe leaves was pasted on the Police Academy walls where a bomb attack claimed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had taken place in July, killing cadets who were leaving the academy at the moment of the explosion. Next to the photograph, he wrote “aloe to their souls,” with the intent to offer “a present to the souls of the dead as one offers flowers in a funeral” (M. Subay, per-sonal communication, 7 August 2012). The third image exhibited a person sitting on the floor, the back facing the viewer, which in Murad’s eyes served to point out when Yemenis “give their back and ignore what is happening” (M. Subay, personal communication, 7 August 2012). These three images were signed and dated under Murad and Jameel Subay’s names and did not capture any media atten-tion (Figure 5).

Following this project, Subay carried out a new campaign that started in September 2012 and contin-ued through 2013. Named “The Walls Remember Their Faces” (al-judran tatadhakar wajuhahum), it was used to point out a political issue: the forced dis-appearance of activists, journalists, and citizens in general from the 1970s until today.17 The govern-ment, both in former North (then presided over by Saleh) and South Yemen, but also Saleh’s most recent regime, are suspected of being responsible for the disappearance of an unknown number of citi-zens. As he did for his first campaign, Murad announced it on Facebook and recurred to the Internet to learn about the use of stencils. Thus, he conceived of stencils that included a portrait of the person who disappeared, his name, a line saying

“enforced disappearance,” and the date it happened, all both in Arabic and English (Figure 6). The first stencils were sprayed in the early morning for fear of repressive reactions, but as the campaign grew in numbers of participants and media coverage Murad changed tactics. He then chose to ask for permission to the authorities in order to stencil walls placed along main roads. In some instances, the stencils were erased or painting washed, only to be quickly restored by participants who joined Subay in this campaign. The fear was justified in a context where the military, suspected of having participated to the disappearances, was largely present in the streets of Sana’a. As Murad Subay stated, “it is a sensitive issue for them, it makes them fearful. The eyes of those who disappeared watch the killers, the officials with blood-soaked hands, right in front of their houses” (Al-Shamahi, 2013). Subay was authorized to spray his stencils and was joined by a large crowd of participants. His campaign not only served to point out an issue of social concern but also trig-gered a larger process of collective memory recov-ery. Participants in the campaign stenciled the images, but they also provided pieces of information about the disappeared citizens or photographs to pro-duce new stencils that ended up reaching the hun-dreds. They commented and exchanged information about their own disappeared family members, par-ticipated in arguments with the military present in the streets, and became agents in the process of

Figure 5. Courtesy of Jameel Subay.

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finding more information about the whereabouts of their family members or acquaintances.

This campaign was clearly a contentious one, making claims and demands to the authorities in power and having several consequences for people aside from the participants themselves. The creation of a special committee to investigate and file cases of enforced disappearance, the discussion over the elaboration of a transitional justice law, and the attention of the Human Rights Minister to promote debate at the institutional level are some of the con-sequences that resulted from the stencil campaign. Although this issue had been raised previously in 2007 (Farhat, 2013), it was the stencil campaign that produced the most important impact via public par-ticipation and the recovery of collective memory, resulting in inclusion of the issue in the political agenda and contributing to finding alive some of the forcibly disappeared.18 The result was a campaign that, initiated by a painter, gave rise to an unintended collective action with consequences never initially imagined.

The large participation that accompanied Murad Subay’s campaigns as well as the media coverage he benefited from encouraged him to transform his practice and even teach his technique in a more institutionalized way. In May 2013, he conducted a workshop at the French Institute in Sana’a where he taught students how to draw, cut, and spray sten-cils that reproduced the faces of poets, writers, thinkers, or, more generally, local and international prominent figures, whose portraits were then spray painted on the walls of the French Institute. Only temporarily, he concealed his practice inside an

institution while simultaneously continuing to develop new campaigns.

Among the changes that have taken place from one campaign to the next, the most important has been the clearer definition his street art projects have acquired as political sensitizing devices. From the first campaign to the most recent one, the political scope of his artistic practice has been consolidated. For instance, the campaign titled “12 Hours” (12 sâ‘a) was designed by Subay to “pass messages of political content,” hoping that his work would have an impact locally and also internationally. He chose for this project the busy commercial streets of Zubayri and Haddah, filling the walls with images spray and brush painted, accompanied by a text writ-ten in Arabic and in English. Other painters joined him, both male and female, reaching a total of six. This campaign unfolded as a series in which each intervention in the public space corresponded to one precise hour that was inscribed in a stencil showing the time. For a year, between 2013 and 2014, the interventions or “Hours” painted on the walls directed attention toward specific subjects such as arms proliferation, sectarianism, kidnapping of for-eigners, trampling of the nation, drone attacks, pov-erty, civil war, corruption, or social marginalization, among others (Figure 7). For instance, the “eight-hour,” which Murad planned for 6 March 2014, was dedicated in his own words “to paint the faces of the victims who were killed at Aurdhy Hospital after a terrorist attack claimed by Al Qaeda Arabian Peninsula, or maybe I should say after the terrorist massacre” (M. Subay, personal communication, 5 March 2013) (Figure 7). His hope was to paint on the

Figure 6. Courtesy of Murad Subay.

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walls of the Aurdhy Hospital itself, and since he con-sidered this a politically sensitive action, he requested authorization that was denied by the Ministry of Defense, deciding then to find other suitable walls. The “12 Hours” campaign ended on the 1 July 2014, with a stencil that reproduced Subay and another painter, a list of all the accomplished hours, and Murad writing “we won’t be silenced.” Following this campaign, he traveled to Italy in November 2014 to receive the Art for Peace award from the Veronesi Foundation. He then returned to Yemen and used the money he received to work on another unprecedented project he formulated as a sculpture campaign.

In January 2015, a month before President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi escaped house arrest and Huthi rebels took over power, Subay together with a group of artists and activists put the first (and only) sculp-ture of his fourth campaign in the middle of a com-mercial street of Sana’a. The sculpture evoked an ancient symbol, “Elmuqah,” related to national unity. Subay wanted to stress Yemenis’ expertise at

state-making with a symbol commemorating that 3000 years ago “the tribes in Yemen wanted to make a state and they united their gods, the star, the moon and the sun” in one god that is “Elmuqah” (M. Subay, personal communication, 26 January 2015). At the beginning of the campaign, Subay feared that the Huthis would prevent him from continuing with the project, but he still planned to put up more sculptures on the streets. Ultimately, however, the deterioration of the political situation interrupted this project and the war, and the lack of electricity made it impossible for him to continue (M. Subay, personal communication, 2015).

During the period from the end of “12 Hours” campaign in July 2014 through the beginning early 2015, Subay’s artistic trajectory was marked by a number of opportunities to exhibit his work outside of Yemen. For instance, in September 2014, he exhib-ited street art works in an art center in the United States and abstract paintings in a gallery in Kuwait. In the United States, this opportunity took place through his political work: the stencils and paintings

Figure 7. Courtesy of Murad Subay.

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he made for “12 Hours” were reproduced within the walls of the Helen Day Art Center in Vermont. The title of the exhibition, “Unrest: Art, Activism & Revolution,” aimed to reflect in the words of the curator “the impact artists have on the political and social reform of countries like Egypt, Yemen, Israel, Palestine, Iran and the United States” (Moore, 2014). According to the description of the exhibition on the art center’s website, this exhibition “looks at artists as activists, revolutionaries and visionaries” (Moore, 2014). This collective exhibition, featuring interna-tionally renowned artists such as Iranian Shirin Neshat and Egyptian artist Lara Baladi, gave Murad’s work a visibility that values the political content of art. Such was not the case with the work he exhibited in Kuwait at the Contemporary Art Platform (CAP). In Kuwait, the exhibition featured his most abstract work, devoid of any political content, with other sim-ilar works made by other artists whose background or country of origin could not be established (M. Subay, 2014).

The first of these exhibitions can be identified with a dynamic of artification and thus interpreted as an opportunity to include street art as an artistic object within spaces that recognize it as such. These experiences that bring international visibility seem to be opportunities seized by Subay when they arise but do not guide his practice, which is centered in the street. The fact that public space is privileged within his trajectory reflects a deliberate choice to inscribe his work in mainly noncommercial places with the aim of reaching a local public and creating aware-ness, engagement, and participation around political issues through artistic interventions. These opportu-nities to access visibility (through exhibiting outside of Yemen) and to reach a certain level of recognition (winning prizes) also suggest that the politicization of art when it is associated with the countries which, following the 2011 revolutionary period, saw their populations mobilize for regime change in authori-tarian contexts, is a viable way to gain access to visibility; valorization; and, potentially, social, eco-nomic, and artistic recognition.

Such visibility was noticeable during Subay’s lat-est campaign, “Ruins,” which began in May 2015 and continued until 2017, in the middle of which he

was awarded the “2016 Freedom of Expression Arts Award” by the Index on Censorship organization in the United Kingdom. This campaign explicitly exposes war crimes and focuses on giving visibility to the lives lost due to the bombings of the Saudi-led coalition. In Sana’a, as in other parts of the country, the bombings have left whole districts in ruins. Subay painted 27 flowers on a wall next to the ruins that remain after a missile killed 27 people, includ-ing 15 children, in Bani Hawat, close to Sana’a (M. Subay, personal communication, 11 June 2015) (Figure 8). Two days later, one of the biggest explo-sions caused by air attacks took place in the capital. Murad and his friends went to the scene and made paintings on ruined walls where dozens of people were killed near the mountain Faj Attan.

Throughout all five of Subay’s campaigns, certain elements converge and others fluctuate. Common to all is the use of public space and of col-lective initiatives aimed not only at painters but to encourage public and unanticipated participation. In all cases Murad paid for materials from his own pocket. When approached by family and friends on the financial issue, he has only accepted help in the form of painting supplies and, of course, par-ticipation. He contends that the success of these campaigns resides in economic independence. Equally self-financed are the campaign participants, who often offer materials that are shared by Subay and the rest of the painters. Furthermore, the choice

Figure 8. “Ruins” campaign.Courtesy of Murad Subay, June 2015, Bani Hawat.

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of the walls and the streets is also a central common feature of Subay’s interventions, highlighting the stakes of territorial appropriation. The streets are chosen in order to grant greater visibility or to pro-vide the artistic intervention with a peculiar mean-ing. A wall can thus be selected due to the symbolic meaning of the street where it is located, as emblem-atic spots associated with the mobilizations of 2011 or as destroyed walls that point out at the violence of an ongoing war. The issue of space also informs an element that appears to be fluctuating in Murad’s projects: the question of painting in authorized or unauthorized places. In this vein, the first and the last campaigns did not imply a need for permission and largely took place on unauthorized walls. Since the second campaign, Murad mixed the use of unau-thorized walls with permission from the authorities. This strategy was present in the realization of one particular intervention within the “12 Hours” cam-paign, which was planned to take place on walls that were later denied by the government. The demand of permission seems to articulate around the perception Murad has of the risks his actions might take in terms of the political claims he makes. Finally, the issue of the effects achieved by these campaigns appears as always unexpected. The case of the stencils portraying disappeared citizens has been so far the only one that generated a collective action with consequences at the institutional level, leaving the possibility open for future interventions to generate such changes or to be conceived with this possibility in mind.

Conclusion

Since the summer of 2013, Subay’s work has been qualified as Banksy-esque murals.19 As he explained, Subay started to read about stencil techniques dur-ing his second campaign, “The Walls Remember Their Faces,” and it was during that time that he “got to know and admire Banksy’s work” (M. Subay, per-sonal communication, 5 March 2014). The social and political commentary that characterizes the British street artist’s work might be the only element in common with Subay’s practice. In Subay’s own words:

I think the similarities between our work are that we both use the stencil technique, and also we both paint about political issues and issues that concern the majority of people […] I don’t really think people in Yemen know who Banksy is, most of them don’t really follow-up with the art news in the rest of the globe. It was only during the “12 Hours” campaign when I was compared to him. I don’t know if the global media appreciated my work more after the comparison, but I do know that the Yemeni street wasn’t affected by it. (M. Subay, personal communication, 5 March 2014)

There are several differences ranging from the most obvious ones, such as experience in the field, which Subay clarifies saying that “Banksy is an expert in what he does and I’m still taking my first steps in this field” (M. Subay, personal communication, 5 March 2014). The most important difference with Banksy—but also with the type of street art that is being “artified” in Europe and in the Americas—is the fact that Subay’s campaigns are collective pro-jects, conceived to provoke the public not only to look at walls in the streets in a new way but also to participate in this redefinition of public space.20 As Subay stated, while Banksy paints alone, “we paint together with a large group of people, whether they are artists or not, and the work takes the form of campaigns” (M. Subay, personal communication, 5 March 2014).

From a sociological point of view, these cam-paigns can be analyzed as incubators of collective action or as in the case of “The Walls Remember Their Faces” as instances of loose forms of collective action. The capacity of street art to be used as a sen-sitizing device used for political awareness that can effectively mobilize people, turning into a pacifist form of contentious, collective action inductive of changes both at the street and at the institutional level, is definitely at the core of the unprecedented case offered by Murad Subay’s campaigns. If a cer-tain level of attention has been drawn to street art used as a sensitizing device for political awareness in revolutionary contexts such as Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, or Bahrain, the Yemeni case provides the opportunity to question the scope of such practice as a repertoire of action.

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More generally, these campaigns have acted as effective devices for bolstering political awareness using public space, provoking the participation of the public and “causing/inciting affective reactions that foster and extend the debate about subjects worth of moral and political concern” (Traïni, 2009, p. 20). The fact that Murad Subay was rapidly joined by teenagers, young artists, workers, intellectuals, and activists, and progressively by passersby and even policemen or the military at work in the streets, is also linked to practices observed at Change Square in 2011. The fact that all sorts of people used public places to openly claim demands was definitely not new to Yemen but that people did so in order to con-test and express critiques that were being openly public and visually translated into contentious artis-tic practices grew since the establishment of the Square. The fact that these practices were no longer restricted to the Square and that people felt free to put colors to the walls of their streets without being officially authorized to do so was relatively new. If in previous years, artists had hung mural paintings in the capital’s walls to express political solidarity to a cause, it has never been a practice perceived as pop-ular and collective until the experiences launched by Murad Subay.

In this light, the popular support and participation have been distinctive elements of the campaigns, linking them to street politics and taking them to a new level of artistic expression made accessible for people and made by people. Although this article has not examined the reception, the audiences, or the role of social media, it is possible to assert that the publicity, commentary, visibility, and appreciation displayed in the media coverage that followed the campaigns contributed in enlarging the participation and enabled in conserving the paintings on the walls.21 At the same time that this visibility contrib-uted to the recognition of the practice and its practi-tioners, it has also highlighted the walls as spaces of struggle where discontent against these images has also been present.22 The walls and streets where these works are located have become sites of discur-sive interaction characteristic of public spheres, fur-ther pointing out that “politics is not only a salon activity but above all a street practice” (Crettiez & Piazza, 2014, p. 123).

Finally, issues of anonymity need to be pointed out since the omission of such a practice is simulta-neously a singularity of Yemeni street art, a contrib-uting element to the professionalization of young artists such as Murad Subay and, more generally, to the transformation of this practice into an artistic one inside the Yemeni context. The myriad of images shared through Facebook, Twitter, and Subay’s web-site and available to view in the transformation of streets in Sana’a into an open museum allow us to observe that almost all the street art works were signed and dated. Since he first started painting the walls, Murad provided a model and also structured the practice: by signing and dating each one of his street art pieces in the same way he signed his can-vases, he was setting a precedent that ended up being followed by a great number of the street painters that responded to his invitation. While the stencils of “The Walls Remember Their Faces” have not been signed, he has been publicly and recognizably linked to the campaign he also initiated. Both the signatures and the public visibility of the artist relatively distin-guish this practice from European, North or South American graffiti, and street art where anonymity is almost essential due to the illegality of these forms of expression. However, as argued by Marisa Leibaut, “the anonymity of the practice has been progressively transformed in that part of the world mainly due to the artification of street art” (Heinich & Shapiro, 2012, p. 160) and its entrance into galler-ies, museums, and auction houses.

In the case of Yemen—in times of revolutionary upheaval, political transition, and war—this precau-tion seemed unnecessary. By signing street art works, Subay symbolically changed the scope of the practice at the same time that he started to make a name for himself. In this vein, numerous foreign television channels as well as Yemeni and foreign newspapers gave the walls altogether with Subay’s project and his signature, unprecedented visibility. While this visibil-ity gained him recognition and support for his pro-jects, he rejected any marketing of his work, and in turn, he used the publicity to increase the participation of young painters, amateurs, and any passerby in what ended up being a very collective practice of public art.

However unexpected the scope of this practice can be, limitations are also present. If during his first

Alviso-Marino 13

campaigns, Murad Subay was more assertive of the capacity that art can have in changing society (M. Subay, personal communication, 9 October 2012), since his “12 Hours” campaign his approach has turned more skeptical, plausibly also due to the political environment of his country and the escala-tion of violence leading to the war. As he has pointed out, the limitations of art as an inductor of change are important and that is probably why he did not conceive of his campaigns as contentious collective actions from their inception. In this vein, some of them have turned into this type of action, such as “The Walls Remember Their Faces,” while others, such as “Color the Walls” or “12 Hours,” have not. In relation to “12 Hours,” Murad expressed awareness of the almost impossibility that his visual devices could make any change in politics, especially in terms of reducing drone attacks, one of the issues he deals with through this campaign. In an article writ-ten by journalist Tik Root and dedicated to describ-ing the use of poetry and street art against US drone attacks in Yemen, he cited Subay’s skepticism about the capacity art can have to induce policy changes. He then quoted Murad saying: “the United States’ counterterrorism strategy will likely ‘carry on’ regardless; maybe I don’t expect any action [from the US], but I will always keep hoping” (Root, 2013). If internationally the scope of Subay’s cam-paigns is limited, locally he has been able to mobi-lize people both to activate collective memory and to induce changes that affected people outside his cam-paign like in the case of the disappeared citizens.

Although the scope of the changes induced remains unseen, the fact that actions have been taken to legally and bureaucratically treat and file disap-pearance cases is as important as the popular impli-cation in identification of the people disappeared. Similar popular campaigns including street art have been undertaken, for instance, in Argentina, where also the lack of juridical actions triggered alternative mechanisms of collective memory recovery and denunciation.23 Similar to Yemen, in Argentina, the “desaparecidos” (the disappeared) have been miss-ing since the 1970s and also instances of this type of illegal state action have been used until recently by current democratic governments. If in Argentina, the role of popular justice initiatives, as well as

collective actions for the sake of memory recovery, are central to today’s institutional and noninstitu-tional politics, Murad Subay’s street art campaigns might be one of many possible steps toward popular and innovative ways of engaging participation and provoking social and political changes.

Notes

1. What I study are interventions in the public space initi-ated by a painter, joined by other painters, and largely by a public not specifically related to visual arts. I use the term ‘street art’ in its broadest sense to refer to mural painting, spray painting, wheat pasting/fly post-ing, freehand drawing and stenciling. I consider these forms of expression socially invested objects that mark the space in an iconographic manner.

2. Saleh formally gained power in 1978, when he became president of the former Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). Upon unification in 1990, he became presi-dent of the current Republic of Yemen until 2012.

3. This term refers to the means of action used in con-tentious politics. See Tilly (1981).

4. See in the case of Yemen: Wedeen (2008) and Messick B, in Salvatore and Levine (2005, pp. 207–229). Other works include Eickelman and Anderson (1999).

5. I purposely understand collective action in a loose sense, as a concerted action through which peo-ple try to attain shared goals. For a more structured definition, refer to Daniel Cefaï (2007) and Fillieule, Agrikoliansky, and Sommier (2010).

6. This approach is embedded in the works of Aminzade and McAdam (2001) and Goodwing, Jasper, and Polletta (2001).

7. I lived in Yemen from May 2008 until March 2011 in order to conduct my doctoral fieldwork. For this article, I conducted interviews with Murad Subay through Skype and e-mails, between 2012 and 2017.

8. On the role of photography during the revolution, see Alviso-Marino (2013 and 2016a).

9. In Egypt, for example, see Klaus (2014).10. Also in the northern city of Saada and surroundings

areas, writings on the walls were also used to reen-act the mobilization of the Huthi rebels. In this case, the freehand writing made with spray paint echoes the slogans of the “Believing youth” movement (al-shabab al-mu’min): “God is great! Death to America and Israel!”

11. I consider the use of “tags” (or signature of the author) as a preservation of the author’s identity. It is

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a fictitious name or pseudonym and thus a technique of anonymity.

12. For a short overview of the history of modern and contemporary visual arts infrastructures in Yemen, refer to Alviso-Marino (2016b).

13. In a report about attacks against pacifist demonstra-tors Human Rights Watch counts 250 dead in Sanaa, Taez, and Aden in 2011. Human Rights Watch, “World report 2012: Yemen,” retrieved from http://www.hrw.org.

14. This campaign echoes what Erique Klaus defines after Pierre Nora as “places of memory” in the Egyptian street art context of 2011. Thus, he refers to places that became iconic in the unfolding of the urban revolt (Klaus, 2014). The status of “memo-rial sites” acquired through street art, especially in Cairo’s street, Mohammed Mahmoud has also been studied, for instance, by Carle and Huguet (2013).

15. This notion refers to noninstitutional politics where the relation between different social actors is approached from the point of view of those sub-ordinated to power instead of from those who have power. Bayart, Mbembe, and Toulabor (2008, p. 20).

16. Literally “servant,” referring to Yemenis mainly of African descent that occupy the lowest position in the social hierarchy. In a less pejorative manner, this highly vulnerable social category is labeled “margin-alized” (muhamasheen).

17. Following the definition provided by Amnesty International, an enforced disappearance

takes place when a person is arrested, detained or abducted by the state or agents acting for the state, who then deny that the person is being held or conceal their whereabouts, placing them outside the protection of the law. The disappeared person is often tortured and in constant fear for their life.

Retrieved from http://www.amnesty.org/en/enforced- disappearances.

18. Such is the case of Mathar al-Iryani, one of the activ-ists disappeared in the 1980s and found alive in 2013. As Nabil Subay (2013) reported, Iryani’s family “reinvigorated the search for Mathar in December 2012 after receiving a phone call from a political activist in Sana’a involved in ‘The walls remember their faces’ campaign.”

19. See Craig (2013), Al-Shamahi (2013), Zarkan (2013), and Root (2013).

20. In this sense, while Banksy did complete surprise interventions in New York City titled “Better Out

Than In” during October 2013, the only interaction with the public was to provoke curiosity and expecta-tion, lightly question the commercialization of street art and its artification, and largely to provide with a background against which people could take pic-tures of themselves. While these interventions were taking place, Murad Subay did his “5th Hour” on 31 October 2013 to denounce the use of US drones in Yemen. His painting was then a clear political device to continue and foster by symbolic means the mobi-lization against drones carried by Yemeni citizens on the streets.

21. By conservation I mean simply not erasing and not painting over. I do not mean campaigns to preserve the graffiti like the ones that have taken place in Cairo, namely, in relation to the walls of the American University of Cairo or Mohammed Mahmoud street.

22. For instance, in Taez, the walls were vandalized with black painting covering large murals reproduc-ing works by Hashem Ali, considered the father of modern painting in Yemen and deceased in 2009. To view images of the campaign “Colors of life” in Taez: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/contents/articles/galleries/yemen-graffiti-vandalism-or-high-art.html. Also, the faces of some of the disappeared stenciled by Murad Subay had been a site of visual struggle in the capital Sana’a. http://www.yementimes.com/en/1613/report/1481/%E2%80%9CThe-Walls-Remember%E2%80%9D-graffiti-puts-a-face-to-Yemen%E2%80%99s-forcibly-disappeared.htm.

23. It is interesting to note that in the case of Argentina, where artistic devices have been used in the public space, similar analysis have been developed to the ones being drawn using the idea of “palimpseste” in the case of the work done by Carle and Huguet or approaching space in terms of “places of memory” like Klaus does, all of them while studying Cairo’s street art. In this respect, refer to the work of Cambra Badii and Dowd (2012).

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Author biography

Anahi Alviso-Marino is a 2017 FMSH/CEFAS postdoc-toral fellow and an associated researcher at the CESSP/France and CRAPUL/Switzerland. She obtained her doctorate in Political Science at the University Paris 1-Sorbonne and the University of Lausanne, researching the political sociology of visual arts in Yemen. Her dissertation was awarded with the 2016 SAV Prize (Switzerland), and it also received honorable mentions from the jury of the 2016 Dissertation Prize on the Middle East and Muslim Worlds (IISMM and GIS), France, and from the 2017 Rhonda A. Saad Prize committee, United States. Her current projects focus on archival and ethno-graphic research in visual arts in Kuwait and Oman. Her publications include peer-reviewed articles, popular pieces, book chapters, and curatorial projects.