Génération Tahrir

Five years after the uprising of 2011, a portrait of Egyptian youth carrying hopes of the Arab world.
In January 2011, the Egyptian youth dragged the country into revolt, dismissing Hosni Mubarak in power for 30 years. Poor education system, unemployment, corruption, ... It is this unbearable reality that has given young people the courage to bring down the regime that paralysed their parents.
Five years later, alas, the omnipotent military state is back and the crackdown on opponents is deadly.
Generation Tahrir yet portrays a generation in motion. The photographs and texts of Pauline Beugnies interact with the striking drawings of the artist Ammar Abo Bakr and a text by journalist and writer Ahmed Nagy closes the book. Together, they recreate with energy and optimism a decisive part of the story being written.
The book was published in January 2016 by the editions of Bec en l'Air.

‘‘ The ultimate symbol of patriarchal tyranny in 2011 was Mubarak. This patriarchal figure crystallised all the problems against which the youth wanted to fight. All the violence suffered, the revolt whether sexual, economic or social. The evil was Mubarak. And he made everyone agree: he had to leave. The occupation of Tahrir Square began somehow, in hue and cry. In 18 days, Rais Hosni Mubarak, the only president Egyptians under 30 had known, was dismissed. SCAF (the Armed Forces Council) would provide the transition. The joy was immense but the revolt was only at its first jolts. I was fascinated. The revolutionary myth in its exacerbated romanticism dazzled me ... ’’

Pauline Beugnies (extract)

Gallery

Authors

Paulines Beugnies

Pauline Beugnies studied journalism in Ihecs, Brussels and photojournalism at the Danish School of Journalism in Arhus. Her documentary work has taken her to Bangladesh, Palestine and Albania where she collected stories in her attempt to deconstruct the stereotypes of Arab and Muslim world in the West. Fluent in Arabic, Pauline Beugnies is currently based in Brussels but travels regularly to Egypt where she has been focusing on documenting the emancipation of youth for the past years.

Ammar Abo Bakr

Ammar Abo Bakr ’s drive to educate and communicate through art has taken his work from the atelier to the public space; his murals are as much about his own artistic expression as they are generating and contributing to a larger dialogue with the public.
Abo Bakr’s works have cased walls in Cairo, Luxor, Alexandria, Beirut, Frankfurt, Berlin, Amsterdam and Brussels, journaling the Egyptian Revolution’s many turning points, as well as themes about Coptic and Islamic culture, folk art and Egyptian history. He became best known for his mural on Mohammed Mahmoud Street leading to Cairo’s Tahrir Square that honors the Revolution's martyrs, giving them brightly colored angel wings in a sign of respect as mourning mothers look on amid naïve art motifs.

Ahmed Nagy

Ahmed Nagy is an Egyptian novelist and journalist born in Mansoura in 1985. He is the author of three books, Rogers (2007), Seven Lessons Learned from Ahmed Makky (2009), and The Use of Life (2014), as well as numerous blogs and other articles. He is also a journalist for Akhbar al-Adab, a state-funded literary magazine and frequently contributes to other newspapers and websites including Al-Modon and Al-Masry Al-Youm. He has been a vocal critic of official corruption under the rule of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.