How Big is the Idea

Bringing her fighting spirit to Stavanger to educate and inspire, university professor Bahia Shehab shows us how her art came to live on our streets with a message of resistance during the Egyptian revolution.

“Art is wonderful, it inspires, but it does not push for action sometimes… If you really want change, which is what we need, at least in my part of the world, we need to do more than just art.”

Translated to “How Big is The Idea”, Shehab’s mural in Stavanger is based on the third stanza of a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, which reads in full, "How vast is the revolution, How narrow is the journey, How big is the idea, How small is the state".

The eagle-eyed viewer will notice a smaller text stencilled to the left of the larger piece. It is here that Shehab has written the fourth stanza: "how small is the state" in a poetic illustration of the power of ideas and activism to overcome the kind of civil oppression she witnesses on a daily basis in her home town of Cairo in Egypt.