Maha Gamil Paints Giant Murals All Over Upper Egypt

A series of enormous, intricate murals painted on apartment buildings in Aswan have been taking over everyone's Instagram feeds over the past week. The murals, which consist of detailed paintings of local faces, are done by Maha Gamil and her husband Ali Abdelfattah, who are on a mission to decorate their city with elements of its own spirit.

Now, Maha Gamil is a public figure, an icon to the people of her city, but that wasn't always the case. When she first started out back in 2011, Gamil didn't think she could paint in the street, because that was one of the things women just weren't allowed to do, socially, at the time. “I decided to paint in the dead of the night, when everyone was asleep,” Gamil tells CairoScene. “I asked my friends to come and stand around me as I did, to hide me from passersby, and maybe learn something in the meantime.”

At the time, Gamil was still a freshman at university studying Fine Arts. Her class was tasked to create one painting a month. While everyone felt like their assignments were too big, Gamil always felt constricted by them. "I would make, like, 13 paintings a month, because I felt like they were too small." When Gamil shared this with her now-husband, then-friend Ali Abdelfattah, he took her to a computer shop and introduced her to street art, suggesting she paint on the biggest canvas they could find: the walls in the street.

"There's a notion that graffiti art is always political, which in turn makes people scared of it," Gamil tells us. "When I started out, it was either political or violent, painted by football fanatics or the 'Ultras'. Societal street art that just wanted to portray a city's culture on its walls didn't exist here."

Nowadays, Gamil and Abdelfattah create their more social murals by first exploring the context in which their artwork would exist. If it's near a hospital, the mural will somehow be related to health. If it's near the Nile, it'll be more touristic. The duo used the same grassroots approach as they explored more governorates, painting walls across Cairo, Sohag, Luxor, Safaga, Hurghada and more.

Gamil now paints proudly, documenting her work on her social media and appearing on national television to speak about it. Looking back, she tells us about the situation that made her realise locals actually appreciated her paintings. "I stood by the first mural I ever painted, and loudly exclaimed that it was disgusting. A nearby family heard me and scolded me for daring to insult the mural. They defended my art like they did their city. That's when I knew my work was valuable."