Bahia Shehab

Bahia Shehab (بهية شهاب; born 1977) is an Egyptian multidisciplinary artist, designer, historian, creative director, educator and activist based in Cairo.

Her work is concerned with identity and cultural heritage, and uses Islamic art history and in particular Islamic calligraphy and graphic design to explore contemporary Arab politics, feminist discourse and social issues.

Her culturally oriented work is concerned with using history as a means to better understand the present, and to find solutions for the future.

Shehab is interested in the ways in which art can be employed for social change, and has explored this phenomenon through her artwork, which draws upon such socially charged themes as Arab identity and women's rights.

Her research is largely concerned with understanding Arabic script, and much of her work explores both traditional and refashioned Arabic calligraphy.

By imbuing traditional Arabic and Islamic scripts with political messages, she has used art to explore and interrogate to understand societal situations and bring them to a larger audience.

Shehab was born in 1977 in Lebanon, and grew up there.

She studied graphic design at the American University of Beirut, studied for a master's degree at the American University in Cairo, and completed her PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Academia: The Graphic Design Program at the AUC

Shehab began teaching at the American University in Cairo in 2010, and in 2011 established the Graphic Design program at the Department of the Arts in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the AUC.

The program focused on the visual culture of the Arab world and encourages students to expand their awareness of Arab visual culture as they work on various design projects.

Shehab encourages her students to make use of their interests while developing their work, and emphasizes the need to use design to solve problems.

She has taught over seventeen courses on design.

Conferences and Symposiums

Shehab has lectured internationally on Arab visual culture and design, design education and curriculum development, women's rights, social issues and Islamic cultural heritage.

Jury and Board Work

Bahia serves on several editorial, corporate and non-profit boards.

She has served locally, regionally and internationally on international design juries, for example for the Art Directors Club of New York 101st Annual Awards.

In 2010, the Khatt Foundation in Amsterdam invited Bahia Shehab to produce an artwork for the exhibition "The Future of Tradition", whose purpose it was to commemorate 100 years of Islamic art in Europe after the exhibition "Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art" at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany.

Her project "A Thousand Times NO" was an art installation and research project that went on display in a room curated by Huda Smitshuijzen Abifares, the founder of Khatt Foundation, with other female artists from the Arab world celebrating the Arabic script.

The main message was the simple "NO", in accordance with the Arabic saying, "No and a thousand times no".

She sought out one thousand different designs of Arabic no's, finding them on buildings, mosques, plates, textiles, pottery and books, and from countries including Spain, China, Afghanistan and Iran - all places where Islam had thrived at one point in history or another.

Her one thousand no's had originally been displayed altogether in the form of a plexiglass curtain at the Haus der Kunst exhibition.

Next to this installation was a book, which was published by the Khatt Foundation, where she gathered all one thousand no's into chronological order, together with the names of the places where she came by them, the media that were originally used to write them and the patrons who were responsible for commissioning the works upon which the no's were found.

Her artwork first appeared on the walls of Cairo during the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and has since been displayed in exhibitions around the world.

Shehab has received several awards for her achievements.

While this project was a form of historical visual research, during the 25 January Revolution in 2011 in Egypt, Bahia "freed" these one thousand no's from their historical associations and gave them new meanings within the political events of the revolution, using the different styles of "no" to protest against current events.

Examples include, "no to burning books", "no to a new pharaoh", “no to stripping the people” and "no to killing men of religion".

Another project, "20 Minarets from the Arab World", is a significant cultural project that was displayed at the Arab Contemporary Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

In this project, Shehab took the minaret, an important element of the architectural landscape in the Arab world, as her starting point, displaying 20 minarets from the Arab world while taking into consideration their proportions, beginning with the smallest minaret from Mogadishu and ending with the tallest from Abu Dhabi.

She also included the minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo in Syria, but it appears in ruins, to represent the cultural disaster that struck in 2013 when the minaret was bombed.

In this project, Shehab was concerned with how the Arab cultural heritage was being physically destroyed on one hand and, on the other, how it was being intellectually attacked by Western nations and labelled as backwards and terroristic.

As part of the installation, Shehab also included the adhan (call to prayer) in the voice of a woman.

Her choice was inspired by the idea that it is time for the feminine voice to rise.

Since 2016, Shehab has been working on a global street interventions campaign that involves spray painting quotes from the Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish on the walls of streets around the world.

She believes that Darwish's words are relevant to the political situation in which we find ourselves today.

The quotes include, "Stand at the corner of a dream and fight" and "I had a dream that will be and a butterfly cocooned in prisons", in honour of Mahinoor Elmasry who was arrested along with countless others for standing against injustice in Egypt.

Other quotes include, "No to the impossible", "We love life if we had access to it", "I will dream", "How big is the idea, how small is the state", "Those who have no land have no sea", "On this earth there are things worth living for", "One day we will be who we want to be, the journey has not started and the road has not ended", and "My people will return as air and light and water".

The style with which these quotes are painted is largely abstract and geometric and uses such simple forms as circles, rectangles and triangles.

In 2019 she was featured in the Polaris catalogue produced by Visual Collaborative, where she was interviewed alongside other artists from around the world.