Ganzeer Interview

Ganzeer: A Voice From the Subaltern

by Alex Puntiel

Ganzeer

Ganzeer rose to fame during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, but his art has undoubtedly resonated and expanded beyond it. Ganzeer is an artist that doesn’t limit himself to a certain medium or approach, prioritizing the messaging of his art first and foremost. From a blend of the personal and the sociopolitical, Ganzeer strives for emotive art that unravels as you peel back its layers. He does this by commenting on subject matter ranging from racial historical injustices to conveying nostalgia while subtly subverting the trope that men don’t cry. Below is my conversation with Ganzeer:

Immigrant Blues #1: Koshari / Ganzeer.com

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How did you learn about Booklyn, and how did you become a Booklyn artist?

Seth Tobocman introduced me to Marshall Weber a few weeks after having landed in New York City, sometime in the summer of 2014. I’d only met Seth the one time prior to that, but we’d been in touch prior as I’d contributed to a couple of issues of WW3 illustrated. I didn’t have any readily available work at the time, and I wanted to have some new work to present to Booklyn right from the get-go, so I created a new screenprint at Bushwick Printlabs which Kevin Caplicki and Josh MacPhee from JustSeeds introduced me to, all of whom were already connected to Booklyn. Upon knowing a bit of my history and seeing the new print, Marshall signed me up right away.

What ideals in your practice align or resonate with Booklyn’s mission?

I like to draw attention to a lot of injustice, bullshit, and wrongdoings in this world through the art I make, and that very much aligns with Booklyn’s commitment to environmental and social justice.

Is your art drawn out of you due to necessity? What is it about the political that inspires you to create?

I’m only really interested in making art that I feel needs to exist. The ideas that come to us are really a dime a dozen, but not all of them come with that burning urgency of “this has to get made.” And those are precisely the ones I’m generally driven to put my time and energy into, and more often than not that will inevitably have to involve some degree of addressing social justice. Social being the keyword here. Everything else–the politics, the environmentalism, the consumerism, the feminism, the racism–all of it stems from a need to address the social injustice in relation to those things.

There seems to be a blend of heritages in your work, from references to street art, historical events, and popular locations to Egyptian myths. Some pieces are more personal while others are more political. Do you approach pieces with these distinctions in mind?

When I work on something, I try to focus on the thing itself with little to no consideration for the remainder of my body of work. That way, the particular project at hand gets the treatment it really needs and everything that entails in regards to references, visual style, and so on. With that said, my references tend to come from a pretty diverse pool given my pretty diverse interests which range from comix to literature—Arabic and Anglophone—to punk-rock to Ancient Egypt to pop culture, Egyptian and American, to Science Fiction to olden mythologies to hiphop to art history, and a whole lot more.

Do you aim to change views and make people think? Your Coney Island mural, in particular, comes to mind. More broadly, do you intend to broaden people’s horizons?

I suppose I have a knack for going against the grain and challenging social norms, even challenging myself sometimes. Challenging popularly accepted views definitely comes with that, but it doesn’t stem from a “you’re all idiots, my opinion is right” kind of position. It’s more of a “well, what if…” sort of attitude. As Paolo Freire pointed out: “The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a ‘circle of certainty’ within which reality is also imprisoned.”

I very much agree with that, and I think a lot of what I do stems from a very similar basis. 

Ganzeer’s Mural at Coney Island

How do you regard the mobilization of movements? 

I’m not sure I regard the mobilization of movements a whole lot. I just tend to express my own opinions and observations, especially when they constitute a viewpoint that is generally absent from the available narrative, and thus one feels compelled to include it. If I have feelings or opinions that are already part of an existent narrative (even if only constituting what one might regard as the oppositional or underground side of the narrative), I feel less inclined to add my voice for some reason. Probably because its already “being taken care of” in a sense. I prefer to operate where I see vacuums. So I’m not sure my output can easily, very squarely sit well with any particular movement, nor do I care for it to, to be honest. This shouldn’t be confused with not caring about society, because I do, and more often than not my work deals with society. But it deals with my viewpoints in relation to society, regardless of whether or not these viewpoints align with the position taken by various movements and their mobilizations.

I think a handful of your work would be deemed provocative by people with more traditional leanings. As you said, you tend to go against the grain. Do you take this type of reaction into consideration? How do you maneuver about this? 

Not Yours – collab with Art in Ad Places / Photo by Luna Park / Ganzeer.com

Well, personally I’m not a big fan of art that evokes no reaction from me. It doesn’t necessarily have to provoke me. It could also bring joy, make me laugh, make my blood boil, hit a nerve, bring me peace, something, anything. And maybe the very best types of art are the ones that bring about multiple emotions, not just one. And I suppose that’s one of the things I aspire to achieve through my work.

Do you have anything you’re currently working on that you can or want to share?

I’m wrapping up a short book for friend and writer Elliot Colla, doing the design and illustrations in a style that is somewhat reminiscent of The Apartment in Bab El-Louk (another book, written by Donia Maher).

Other than that, my two major projects, which I hope to bring to a close sometime next year, are my extra-ambitious sci-fi graphic novel THE SOLAR GRID and a collection of short stories titled TIMES NEW HUMAN.

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Check out Ganzeer’s website here: https://www.ganzeer.com

More info. on Ganzeer’s THE SOLAR GRID: https://thesolargrid.net

Link to TIMES NEW HUMAN here: https://timesnewhuman.com

Ganzeer’s artist page: http://booklyn.org/archive/index.php/Detail/Entity/Show/entity_id/4920