ABSTRACT
Recent activist art in the Arab World is largely understood as an outgrowth of the Arab uprisings and the subsequent political and social movements that were sparked by a series of mass protests beginning in Tunisia in late 2010. Yet artists from the region have long worked in the service of liberation movements, particularly anticolonial struggles. In many ways, the Arab uprisings were continuations of various twentieth-century movements whose aims were never fully realized. This essay explores dissident art with a special focus on the creative explosions that took place in Egypt and Syria in 2011 and 2012, respectively. It describes the circumstances under which artists were creating, how their work intervened in political discourse, aiding liberation movements, and how they sought to engage the public.
