Bahia Shehab’s latest work on the streets of Cairo memorialize 51 children killed in a school bus crash. In this image, three brothers have a conversation. Child 1: “They still didn’t get the lesson.” Child 2: “NO.” Child 3: “It’s OK, repetition is the best teacher.”

On November 17, 2012, in a village in Assuit-Egypt, a train crashed into a school bus killing 51 children. These kinds of accidents have always been brushed aside as random acts of chance. The minister of transportation resigned as a result, and the families of the children were compensated financially. There was a huge public outcry … but eventually these children were forgotten.

But the details of this accident that circulated on social networks were still very vivid in my mind. A video of a regretful father who, when asked the last thing he said to his son before he got on the bus, cried bitterly and said that he hit his son so that he would not miss the bus. Another video showed a girl, only nine years of age — one of the survivors — saying calmly on TV to the government, “You are all dogs.” A note circulated commenting on the price paid by the government to each family and comparing it to other more expensive items, like an iPhone or the front light of a Mercedes Benz. The image of the children wrapped in their shrouds. The cries of the mothers who lost 2 or 3 or 4 children in that accident — one of them has been admitted to a psychiatric ward. And finally a list of the dead children’s names.

In this image, the girl says: “I went to heaven and they are all going to hell.” It’s on the burnt building of the ex-ruling National Party in Downtown Cairo.

All the other details were very painful to me, but the list of names just locked the deal in my head. I wanted to paint these children. To me these children were killed by a corrupt system of governance. We started a revolution so that accidents like this would not happen again. I wanted to bring the children back to life.

I collected the names of the children and grouped them into boys, girls and families. I wanted to paint the sisters and brothers who died together — so that they could come to life again on the streets of Cairo, together. I painted each child walking on a train railway. They are painted in black but their wishes and dreams are painted in color.

This girl says: “I wish I grew up to be a princess.” The green plate reads: “Land owned by Princess Nora al-Saud, Giza-Cairo.”

On the 25th of January, 2013, I started painting the children of Assuit on the walls of Cairo. Some of them appear alone to ask a question, like “ I wish I grew up to be a princess” or “ I could have grown up to be a policeman or a scientist.” A sister calms her brother with a lullaby near a bus stop. The lullaby reads, “Mother is on the way” and her brother asks her, “Soon?” A little girl states that she has died and gone to heaven but they (meaning the responsible ones) are all going to hell. But my favorite is on a barrier wall in downtown Cairo. I painted 8 children playing hide and seek.

Child 1: Khalawees (Are you done? Did you hide?)

Child 2: Not yet.

Child 3: Has the revolution succeeded?

Child 4: Not yet.

Child 5: Did we get the rights of the martyrs?

Child 6: Not yet.

Child 7: Has Egypt become heaven on Earth?

Child 8: Not yet.

The first wall Shehab sprayed in front of the Ministry of Interior, with her series “A thousand times No.”

This barrier wall has a very special story for me. It was the first wall I ever covered with my “A thousand times No” series on February 15, 2012. Another group of artists came on March 15 and painted the street perspective with a very special character, Hanzala, added to the wall as part of a campaign called “There are no walls.” The artists painted the street and pretended that there was no wall — they danced and they sang.

This same wall, painted by other artists to look as if it weren’t there.

When I came back on January 25, even though artists pretended that there was no wall, the walls were still there. So I decided to add the children with Hanzala, with their questions and their dreams.

The children of Assuit will keep appearing on the streets of Cairo, as the conscience of an ongoing revolution, so that we all remember why we went down to the streets and why are we still going down to the streets until today.

In dialogue with the other artists, who put only Hanzala on the street, Shehab painted eight children on the wall.

Two years ago, Lebanese-Egyptian artist and historian Bahia Shehab was invited to join an exhibit commemorating 100 years of Islamic art in Europe. The catch: she had to use Arabic script in her work.

“As an artist, a woman, an Arab and a human being living in the year 2010, I only had one thing to say—I wanted to say no,” Shehab says in this powerful talk from TEDGlobal 2012. “In Arabic, we say ‘No and a thousand times no.’”

Shehab decided to focus on the Arabic script for “no.” She collected a thousand different visual representations of the word “no” printed, stitched, molded, engraved and cast over the past 1,400 years on vases, tombstones and walls, in locations as far-flung as Spain and the border of China. She called the installation A Thousand Times No.

A year later, a revolution began in Egypt. “Life stopped for 18 days,” says Shehab. “On the 12th of February, we naively celebrated on the streets of Cairo believing that the revolution had succeeded.”

Months later, as the reaction to the revolution turned violent and the country braced itself for a much longer battle, Shehab began to see a connection between A Thousand Times No and her country’s situation. She took to the streets, spray-painting “no” on walls throughout Cairo.

“I did not feel that I could live in a city where people were being killed and thrown like garbage on the street,” Shehab said, describing her first image, which read “no to military rule” in a script taken from a tombstone. “A series of ‘no’s came out of the book like ammunition.”

Some of the “no”s that followed: No to a new pharaoh. No to violence. No to killing men of religion. No to burning books. No to the stripping of veiled women.

To hear more about Shehab’s art, and the specific meaning of these “no”s, watch her beautiful talk and read the TED Blog’s Q&A with her. Below, read about two new projects Shehab has been creating in Cairo.

Shehab tells the TED Blog:

This is a campaign that I sprayed before the presidential elections, in May and June of 2012. The mass sentiment was very low and there were a lot of anti-revolution feelings in the air, even by people who were strong supporters of the revolution. I did this campaign to remind people of the aims of the revolutions and the sacrifices that people made for us to get to where we are. It is called “There are people” and the five stencils read:

There are people who have had their head put to the ground so that you can raise your head up high.

There are people who have been stripped naked so you can live decently.

There are people who have lost their eyes so you can see.

There are people who have been imprisoned so you can live freely.

There are people who have died so you can live.

The authorities erased this campaign three days after I sprayed it, which proved to me one thing—the faster they erase, the stronger the message. So I sprayed it again a month later, this time with bigger images and clearer text.

Two weeks after that, somebody took a photo of it and the campaign went viral. Three weeks later, it was featured on the third page of one of the leading local newspapers, right under the image of Mubarak. The message has surpassed the medium and I was very proud.

This is a campaign I did on speed bumps in August of 2012. I took a street that leads out of Tahrir Square, and I painted a message before the speed bump: “Beware of Speed Bumps.” After the bump, I painted: “Long live the revolution.”

To the taxi drivers — who were thanking me for highlighting the problem at 4 in the morning of a Ramadan day — I was doing a socially responsible act. I was doing the work the government should do to keep them from harm by highlighting a speed bump on a busy street. But to someone with more insight, they will understand that I am highlighting the fact that for us as people leaving Tahrir Square and heading towards a new phase of the revolution, we should be aware of speed bumps and we should keep the main aims of the revolution very clear in our minds.

How did your work with the character for “no” begin?

Two years ago, I was asked to produce an artwork for The Future of Tradition – The Tradition of Future, an exhibition at the Haus Der Kunst, Munich, produced by the Khatt Foundation in Amsterdam. The foundation is concerned with the development of Arabic script, and the exhibition was to showcase works by female Arab artists and designers.

The curator had only one condition: I had to use Arabic script for my artwork. I started contemplating the beauty of Arabic poetry, the poetry of the language and so on. But I worried that I could never express myself in Arabic to a European audience because of the language barrier. I would get lost in translation.

Then I thought that for me, as a human being living in the world at that moment — as an artist, an Arab, a woman — I decided I only had one thing to say: NO. There were a thousand things I wanted to say no to.

In Arabic to confirm and stress the no, we say, “No, and a thousand times no.” So I decided to look for a thousand different nos. It was very intimidating. I didn’t think I could find a thousand different shapes of the word in Islamic history. But to my surprise, I found thousands. I just had to stop at a certain point. It showed me how rich the culture is, how global. I found characters from Spain, Afghanistan, Iran, China, the borders of China, on everything ever produced — buildings, mosques, architecture, plates, textiles, pottery, books. I examined all of these things, and it was very easy to find the character because the Islamic Shahadah starts with “There’s NO God but God.” So the word “no,” even in Islamic and Arabic culture, was easy to spot because it was everywhere.

With the thousand nos, I created a Plexiglass curtain, 3.5 by 7 meters. I also compiled my findings in a book, placing the nos chronologically, stating the places I found them, the medium, and the patron that commissioned the work.

Then the revolution began. How did that shift the nos in your work?

When the revolution began in January 2011, I forgot completely about the artwork and I became very immersed in the revolution. Then at some point, about nine months into it, I realized that every no has a reason. They’re not a thousand general nos. I can assign a purpose, a message, to each one of these nos. So: “No for a new pharaoh,” “No to beating women,” and so on. So I started using the nos like ammunition. I designed stencils with them, and sprayed them in the streets. At the same time, I was taking these characters out of their historic context to put them in a new context — a modern context — giving them new life. So many of these nos are resurrected forms coming back to life.

You create a different stencil for each message of protest. How do you decide which no to use?

The nos I take from history are relevant to the topic at hand. So, for example, if I take one that originated from the wall of a mausoleum, I use it for a topic that is relevant to it now — like a man dying or being beaten. The guy who lost his eyes and became a symbol of the revolution — I used a font called najm, meaning ­star, because he became a star of the revolution. The revolution gave a face to my nos. But these are small nuances just for me. Nobody on the street will ever understand them. They are just little cues for me to make history relevant to modernity. The historic knowledge is only available to me because I did the research. But while it’s not public knowledge, I think it’s felt on the street. There’s a resonance.

It sounds like you were surprised by the results of your research.

Yes. As a historian, the results, chronologically, created a shocking finding for me: the richness of the evolution of the script, from the birth of the Islamic civilization up until the 15th or 16th century, was amazingly vibrant and creative and so out there. If we could now think the way these designers and calligraphers thought, it would be amazing. Then, up until the 17th century, there was a stagnant period, and then later, the printing period and digital age started. Now, everything looks the same: we now more or less have one letter shape, and it’s the same one being repeated over and over again. You can actually trace the life of the civilization simply by looking at the life of this one character.

So this was a great insight on our human state, even politically and socially, how stagnant we are, simply by looking at the evolution of the shape of our script. It’s all these nos, hundreds of them, that just look exactly the same. There’s no creativity. There’s no innovation. If you look back in history and compare, it’s shocking what the script looked like and what it looks like today. The gap is just mind-blowing.

Aesthetically I’ve also always loved the shape of the word no in Arabic. It’s a beautiful ligature composed of two letters. I’ve always wanted to see how different calligraphers had solved the problem of combining them. Other than the political statement of the work, I was interested in the development of the character in different mediums by different designers.

Did you make art before this project?

Never anything so big. It was always more design than art. But the paradigm of what is art has shifted for me since I started working on the street. The audience has changed, and the lifespan of the work is more ethereal. The most important thing now is for me to keep exploring ways of getting the message across. I will differ with McLuhan only this once and say the medium is not that important for now.

I’ve designed a museum concept for the revolution, but there was no minister in place to see the commission through, so the project is still in my drawer. I am sure it will see the light eventually, somewhere.

How are you spending your time these days?

I’m working on a PhD on the Fatimid Script and its evolution at Leiden University in Holland, and I’m building a four-year graphic design program for AUC. I’m developing a total of 24 courses on graphic design, with some very new classes on the history of design and advertising as a discipline in the Arab world that have never been offered anywhere before. I start teaching the first official class of design students this September, and I am very much looking forward to that. I am also preparing to give a talk at the “Global Anarchisms” conference at Cornell University in Ithaca, and another talk at the Aspen Cultural Diplomacy Forum “The Art of Peace-building and Reconciliation”  in Tokyo in the coming months.

How has your TED fellowship experience affected you and your work?

The greatest realization the TED fellowship has given me is that I am not alone in my endeavours, and that there are many other people who are crazy enough to believe that they can change the world. So even when the whole world around you thinks that what you are doing is too utopic and unrealistic, at TED you find people who will tell you that the bigger your dream is, the better. The TED fellowship was like a pat on the back, a salute from a group of fellow dreamers to continue the struggle. Sometimes that is all you need.

Do you intend to carry on designing and spraying stencils? And are you worried about the danger?

Yes, I can’t stop now. Now is the time to work, even harder than before. Danger is a state of mind, and it is relative. I do not feel that what I am doing harms anyone, so I do not expect harm back.

How quickly before you run out of nos?

I still have 975 to go.