Graffiti Art: The Openness of Art outside the Galleries

 Sikka, Al-Sadig Yaseen

Graffiti art is unique in its ability to reduce a lot of words and narratives in one phrase, one aspect, or a sign with certain signification in the conscience of the passers-by, contemplating their city's facades, and the people who are interested in interacting with the space of walls. Since the essence of the graffiti art is an expression, the artists working in the graffiti art have raised many issues of common interest through painting and coloring on the walls of the facades and public buildings, during the glorious December Revolution. This kind of art has become a familiar form that distinguishes the façades and public buildings.

During the year before the December Revolution, the city's walls were subject to precipitous and confused visits that represented an opportunity snatched by the political activist in a few minutes to write on the walls to deliver a message, political slogan, or publicity campaign. Before that, walls and murals were a favorable place for lovers. With a wonderful ability in repressive cities and urban places, the walls of high schools were the most enduring to innocent love's energies of the young people at the beginning of expressing their emotions through rudimentary love letters or copied poetry about love. The boldest young man at the time was the one who wrote the beloved name on the walls. These writings have found their place to circumvent the power of customs and traditions that prevent meeting lovers. Really the arts and the space of expression were stealing opportunities for generations to come, a generation liked to hang around it to express their emotions with shyness and anticipation on the walls of schools.

The arts remained in a compulsory isolation away from the younger generation of the Sudan before the glorious December Revolution. The graffiti art was too dangerous for its practitioners who were held accountable and arrest. These conditions left a state of boring identification with public facades incite haste in crossing the streets and alleys. This situation continued until the young generation opened up a new world provided by social media. The isolation imposed on drawing and painting began to fall apart through exhibition spaces and interaction with the worlds of art and artists. With this transformation, fine arts began to feel an authentic position in people's daily dialogues through songs, poetry and painting. The styles of expression by drawing and graffiti draw their strength from the fact that they are deliberately interested in unsettling the ideas of the public or raising general inquiries. This comes through phrases, forms and symbols that, in one way or another, reveal the social emotions that alleviate restrictions and censorship and break free of them. The styles of expression by drawing are striving to reformulate the questions of change. The walls and murals have presented the place available for political expression, and have based literary   establishment based on slogans of the narrative poem of the prominent poet, Mohamad Al-Hassan Salim Humaid:

"A good baby came out of our wombs, like a light beam;

His mother raised him to the wall of the mosque.

He wrote: "Down with the voodoo of power";

Dawn with Balla and our subordinate sheikh.

We have exposed you and your plan,

Long life to your dogs, Al-Jabriya,

Long life to the hands of those suffering a lot."1

The walls and murals have represented the only medium that cannot be silenced, and can raise awareness and highlight issues in the alleys of the villages and inner cities. 

Space of the City: Space for Freedom Seekers

Public facades represented a favorable medium that was alternative to the press, and always alerting to the value of freedom and democracy, advocated by change seekers. During more than a decade before the spark of the glorious December Revolution, the public facades in schools, universities and even mosques were a space for political messages and claims on rights. These facades represented a wide-ranging record for codification of human rights violation and raising corruption cases. Facades were also the safest collective medium to express solidarity with youth political organizations. During this period, certain patterns of codification were common in the search for freedom, such as: "Freedom for the detainees in the prisons of the regime/Security service. Despite the scarcity of writing on the walls and murals and the contraction of their geographical scope in the universities and some neighborhoods, which represented a haven and incubator for the movement of political activists, they were dangerous and required secret work and advance arrangements to buy paint sprays and the required materials for writing the slogans. All these measures were being taken to hedge the brutal security services of the regime.

Overlapping of the Technology and the Firs Forms of Drawing

At the beginning of the last decade, the new media revolution had created an open space to evade pre-censorship on the arts. This revolution provided safe spaces for political action through opening up to the public at the lowest humanitarian cost, away from the security grip. The young generation of political and community actors opened up on surrounding experiences, where the arts associated with new projects that enabled the public to emerge from strict restrictions and brutal control over forms of expression. The observations and experiences of the political actors in the Sudan represented an open path to the use of technology in the transmission of the political publications. This came through the use of drawing, editing and unloading the drawings on the wall by new and easier to use methods. This space paved the way for newcomers to the expressive arts, especially the art of graffiti. An old familiarity grew between the graffiti artists and the walls, facades and house of their city. These artists can be named the newcomer to the arts through the gate of the political or rights struggle, or the comers from experimental spaces, such as the graphic designers and painters whose works were relocated in new forms of new interaction through different media.

The Presence of Symbol and Color

The currents and art groups working on public issues have got immersed in enhancing the presence of colors and symbols as untold words for measuring opinion or creating familiarity in a society sympathetic to their issues. The victory signs, the hand grip that means unity and the forms that were unloaded by the use of stickers appeared to show the faces of the detainees, the symbolization of demand of justice by showing the dictator's head in the noose, or the symbols of the tied hands to refer to the cases of detainees have appeared. Other social and political campaigns adopted the color symbols, such as the orange color which was used as a symbol of change by the youth organizations that contributed to the explosion of the glorious December Revolution and the public's interest in the public issues.

Other Life of Arts

The professional and amateur artists associated with new patterns of art through the spaces of interaction produced by the graffiti art. Art emerges to be created before the eyes of the passers-by and denies the mere invisible existence or the invisibility of color in exhibition galleries and enclosed spaces. Artists had to transmit patterns of artistic currents to a non-specialist audience intercepted by façades that sought to tempt the senses in a form which made the arts overlap with the everyday questions of the passersby. On repeated tours, the paintings of the walls were able to draw the attention of hasty citizens passing the streets of the city. Hundreds of citizens lived through the work of the artist on their paintings and the stages of the drawing, and dealt with the artists who were interested in raising their artistic questions on the streets of the city. The paintings added a new distinction to the streets and neighborhoods of the city through the distinctive feature of the painting and their consistency with the questions of new spaces, imposed by the glorious December Revolution. The paintings, which included the artistic projects of the artists, took to the streets, alleys and public facades. The city also turned into a drawing workshop in an open space for experimentation and interaction between amateur and professional artists, an exhibition, and an opportunity for the ordinary people to live with the worlds of arts, drawing and painting. Paintings in the public facades turn the daily errands of the citizen to track saturated with questions and public issues that their emergence test their daily lives.

Footnotes

1. The Poem of the village of Al-Jabriya, Mohamad Al-Hassan Salim Humaid.