The Economics of Creative Expression

About two years ago, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) convened a meeting, featuring individual representatives from the most prominent independent arts and culture spaces operating in Cairo. It was an intimate gathering of around fifteen people at the Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training, and Environmental Research (CLUSTER) offices, downtown on 26th of July Street. Everybody in the room knew each other, their intimacy indicative of the dwindling nature of what was once a vibrant and populated independent cultural scene. Once everybody had gathered around the table, AFAC representatives announced the release of a new grant dedicated to funding running costs for midsize independent cultural institutions in the Middle East and North Africa region for a threeyear span. In the schema of funding networks after 2014, such a grant was unparalleled. Although this is a problem facing institutions regionally and worldwide, in Egypt specifically large-scale administrative grants are not as accessible as they once were, and most institutions struggle to squeeze overhead costs (salaries, rent, and utilities) into project-based grants. I believe the intended tone of the meeting was celebratory, although upon announcing the grant the AFAC representatives were met with a host of unsolicited reactions, as the individuals in the room took the opportunity to air out grievances. They expressed burnout from the toll of the emotional labor required to run such organizations, the difficulties of management, and the frustration of being dependent on grant-giving structures that circumscribed the possibility for growth and limited opportunities for sustainability. Individuals complained that their organizations (some of which were twenty years old) were not capable of handling a grant dedicated to running costs because they did not have solid accounting systems in place. Other individuals complained that they would have difficulty accessing the funds because they had not set up an account outside of Egypt that would allow them to receive funding, as foreign funding was legally banned in Egypt in 2017. One individual who worked in an art space that operated as a “vanity gallery” (meaning it charged artists to rent the space and exhibit work) got up halfway through the meeting and left, no longer interested in what grant-giving organizations had to offer. The predicament of independent arts spaces in Cairo is a story of civil society in Egypt at large. In September 2016, Representative ‘Abd al-Hadi al-Qasbi submitted the first draft of the Law Governing the Work of Associations and Other Foundations Working in the Field of Civil Work (referred to as the NGO law) to Egypt’s House of Representatives. The law, which was passed in May 2017, ensured that all non-state actors, including most of the independent art spaces operating outside of the Ministry of Culture, would be unable to access funding from foreign sources. According to the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP) brief, “Individuals from civil society organizations faced arrests, travel bans, and asset freezes both before and following the NGO Law’s ratification.” This law catalyzed what had been a gradual withdrawal process of various funding bodies and civil society organizations from Egypt that began after the January 2011 revolution. The withdrawal of organizations such as the Ford Foundation, which had been a bulwark of support for arts institutions (as well as civil society institutions) in Egypt, instigated a shift in an arts ecosystem that had been present since the 1990s. Arts spaces such as the Townhouse Gallery for Contemporary Art, where I worked as curator for four years, were founded and flourished thanks to aid structures that saw contemporary art as a conduit for