Graffiti of empowerment

Street art is a creative way to express and impress people to get connected to art. Since a few days a bunch of international artists are paintings the walls of houses at Maqta.

Among them are the two women artists Rouge from France and Ness Lee from Canada have taken graffiti into a next level. Their wall art is a statement on gender equality and breaking stereotypes.

Being visual artists and multi-media artist from their respective places these artists shared their views certainly made an impact to many people who participated in the panel discussion that was held at Alliance Francaise.

They spoke about their roles as street and mural artists working outside their own studios and taking art to public sphere. They also shared a case study to be a woman working in public spaces with urban context and also where that impulse comes from and why they decided to seek that public space.

Stressing more about the space that woman are given in the world of graffiti, they said, "We wouldn't say that women are not interested in it, definitely they are very interested as they have always been in all form of creativity."

Talking about their challenges they said, "For us street art is hyper masculine, but it is more sexist than any other art workspace. The question here is gender equality in the art space; people think that street art might be more challenging for women because it is the night time thing."

"Do everything that you want to do, normalise things, be visible while you work; just being there and doing the job is more important," mention these artists.

Speaking about vandalism they said, "We think there is a common notion that vandalism is a concept of being in rebellion, but i think that the whole idea of graffiti art is itself in a reclaim space. This will minimize the others to access places like that."

On asking them about what can be done for the graffiti art to be recognised they said, "I think it is quite well recognised and it still has to be recognised in contemporary art space.

But we don't think that graffiti artists would want to enter that space cause, it rejected our practices for a long while. We have an alternative way.

There is always a gender gap that can be seen in the graffiti art works and the two ladies agree to it.

"It all depends on work spaces and it has to depend on women as they are undermined. A lot of male privilege is given to men, and there's no such kind of thing when it comes to women."

However, "Painting something on a huge wall is definitely empowering for young girls," they add.

Naming their art works as feelings and contemporary realism - these two are really an inspiration to count on.