On a crowded street in Cairo, a short-haired woman in her thirties tries to push her small frame through a sea of bulky men, all of them angry and trying to stop what she is doing.

“Do you call this art?” yells a balding man in a light blue suit. “They told you that making people walk like animals is art?”

The woman is not alone. She has a group of 15 other men following her. Young and old, dressed in poor outfits, they are down on their hands and knees, crawling their way through the crowds. This is a busy area of the city filled with hordes of people, but the men on all fours immediately stand out. Distinguished by a posture that suggests being abused, handicapped, submissive and rebellious all at once, they become "the other" — a hindrance not so much to the actual flow of traffic but to onlookers' comfort zone of accepted appearances that can veil all kinds of social malaise.

As bystanders and passers-by react in almost equal doses of anguish and anger, the woman stands her ground, saying, “I am an artist and this is an art performance,” adding, “It is important.”