Ashley Cope is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland where she studies American art and visual culture with Dr. Tess Korobkin. Ashley received her BA in Art History and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota before serving as the 2019-2020 Gerry and Lisa O’Brien Curatorial Fellow at the Weisman Art Museum where she curated Locally Grown: Documentary Photography of Minnesota Communities. Ashley received her MA from the University of Maryland in 2022 and is currently writing a dissertation on gender nonconformity and non-binary form in interwar American art.
HistoReminders is a series of image-driven interviews in which three contemporary artists share how history, cultural heritage, and memory influence their work. This video interview and accompanying transcript of Sherin Guirguis, conducted by Ashley Cope, was recorded via Google Meet on October 17, 2025. Join Sherin and Ashley as they discuss women’s histories in Egypt and the importance of keeping erased and forgotten histories alive through research, storytelling, and art. – Ashley Cope, Curator
PART I — Introductions
ASHLEY Hi, I’m Ashley Cope. I’m at the University of Maryland Art Gallery, where I currently work as a curatorial and registrar assistant. I’m joined today by Sherin Guirguis, an artist based in LA, who we’re going to hear from in just a second. But quickly, a little bit about myself: I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, where I study 19th– and 20th-century American art, and my current research reveals how early-20th-century artists constructed non-binary gender expressions and embodiments through their experiments with identity and artistic form.
I’m really thrilled to be joined today by Sherin, and I’d love to just invite you to introduce yourself!
SHERIN Thanks, Ashley. Thank you for the invitation. It’s really wonderful to be part of this project and archive. I’m calling in today from my studio in Highland Park, which is in northeast Los Angeles. And I’m an artist, I’m a mom, I’m a teacher. I wear a lot of these hats.
I was born and raised in Egypt, and I’ve been working in Los Angeles for the last I-don’t-know-how-many years now. When we moved to the US, we moved directly to the suburbs of LA and different parts of Los Angeles. So, I call Los Angeles home just as much as I do Luxor and Cairo.
My practice addresses a lot of different elements. Right now, I’m kind of in a moment where the practice is really shifting towards understanding ancestral histories and indigeneity around Egyptian culture and Egyptian identity. I have been working a lot around hidden, forgotten, and erased histories, particularly with a focus on women’s histories. And I think now it feels like it’s kind of broadening out in that way. So, it’s not just focused on women’s histories, but collective histories, and then also going further back in time and thinking about what it means to be an indigenous Egyptian person, *remenkimi, and how that really is going to unfold in the way that I root and ground my practice. *Remenkimi comes from the Coptic language and translates to “those of Egypt” or “belonging to Egypt.”
ASHLEY Great, thank you. Speaking of buried histories or forgotten histories, that’s kind of what drew me to you. I was looking through the Now Be Here directory of artists, thinking about this curatorial project, and thinking specifically about histories. That’s where I feel a lot of my practice as an art historian is really grounded: histories that don’t feel that long ago—the early 20th century, mid-20th century—but feel, in many ways, very buried, forgotten, or intentionally erased. And what really drew me to this project and developing this is that, as I’m sure we might touch on [in the interview], as institutions and individuals who study erased and often difficult histories are increasingly censored or obstructed from sharing those diverse perspectives from the past, I really wanted to highlight artists like you who are doing that important work of making those obscured histories accessible and engaging for a public audience through their artwork. So, that’s what brings us together today, and I’m really glad that you were able to participate!
PART II — Doria Shafik and Egyptian Feminism
ASHLEY [Let’s jump] into…one of my first questions for you. I’m really excited to talk to you about your work, not just as an artist, but also as kind of a historian. You are interested in these often-neglected histories, particularly of women, although you’re now expanding and expanding your practice. In particular, you’ve done a lot of work on the 20th-century Egyptian feminist, Doria Shafik. I was wondering if you could tell people who might not know about her a little bit more about Shafik’s life, how you got engaged with her, and what your work as an artist and historian is around her history.
SHERIN I want to frame it a little bit more here in saying that I’m not a historian. Right? So, for me, it’s so nice to be in conversation with a historian, because I think our work, this type of work, is really collective practice. For me as an artist, I can connect with these histories in a very different way than a historian can and sometimes has to. But our work does intersect in these institutions, sometimes in museums, in academia, and also in public space, which we’ll be talking about soon. I’m really thinking about my work—and it started, especially with Doria, as a personal archiving. So, what is a person living in diaspora, a person that experienced migration, and this kind of disconnect and unbelonging that [I had], having migrated as a teenager to the US. These were all experiences that raised a lot of questions for me about belonging, about home, about connection with both my culture, my language, my place. And then building a new, or maybe a more hybrid idea of home and place and belonging. That was the question out of which this practice evolved and emerged.
“And I kept being told through institutional and formal histories that feminism is this Western idea, that it was constructed in the West and then brought to Egypt, North Africa, and the SWANA region through colonialism… I just knew that the history that I was being taught was not true to me, to my experience.”
SHERIN For me, Doria was a kind of an accidental engagement, because her work was really not documented at all, and her work was actively erased, both in Egypt and elsewhere. I had been doing work around feminism, the histories of feminism in Egypt and in the surrounding regions, because it’s just who I was as a person. And I kept being told through institutional and formal histories that feminism is this Western idea, that it was constructed in the West and then brought to Egypt, North Africa, and the SWANA region through colonialism. And it’s just not my experience. And also, you know, having left Egypt at a pretty young age, not knowing what the alternative story was, like what other histories existed, I just knew that the history that I was being taught was not true to me, to my experience. And so, I started researching in a very informal way archives of who were the feminists, who were women in modern Egyptian history, who were in dialogue and in practice of feminism. And where their philosophies were coming from and where their activism was coming from.
And so, I was first introduced to Huda Sha’arawi, who was a little bit more well-known, because her feminist practice came at the time Egypt was pushing out the British occupation, so there’s a lot more documentation around her work in the [history of the] decolonization of Egypt. And there’s a little bit more writing around that.
And then I accidentally came across Doria’s name, which was like one or two sentences in a larger book about the history of modern Egypt. I started asking around and very few people knew about her and her work, so I dug a little deeper. And coincidentally—and this happens a lot with this project that involves Doria, there’s these strange and beautiful coincidences—a friend who’s a writer, also Egyptian, happened to know one of [Doria’s] daughters, who was her professor at the American University in Cairo (AUC). [My friend] had heard that [Doria’s] archive potentially was at AUC and put me in touch. And both of [Doria’s] daughters were eager to share her story and her work and her archive with me. So, it was just one of those things. And I feel like Doria’s presence is so felt in this work. It was her time to really be remembered.
And the act of finding and remembering and retelling [Doria’s] story was also a way for me to remember myself and my roots. It was also a time politically here in Los Angeles where we were talking about the manipulation of histories and the erasure of certain histories from classrooms and from teachings. So, really learning…her story, which I’ll tell you a little bit about: at the age of 16, [Doria] wanted to continue her studies. At the time in Egypt, women were not admitted to universities, but there was this really small program that was starting where if you got sponsorship, you could travel to Europe and continue your studies there. So, there’s a small group, I think six or eight women were granted permission to travel to the Sorbonne [University in Paris, France]. [Doria] was able to get permission to study philosophy and wrote two…different theses for her PhD. One was around feminism and its origins within Islam and how it’s practiced in Egypt, and the other one was about Egyptian art as art for art’s sake. [These things] were interesting to me on different levels.
“The act of finding and remembering and retelling [Doria’s] story was also a way for me to remember myself and my roots.”
SHERIN And then on her way back from one of those trips—she’s also a poet and a publisher and started two different feminist journals, one in French and one in Arabic—[Doria] essentially started a women’s movement that was asking for representation in government. Through the journal, through the writing, through the poetry, through breaking these boundaries of education, these limits, [Egyptian women] actually conducted a protest where they marched to parliament, and they were able within a year or two to actually get voting rights and representation in parliament in the mid to late 1950s. [Doria was] also traveling the world and starting to engage with other feminists globally, engage with human rights ideologies all over the world… And what I really loved about her activist practice is—she had a lot of privilege. She was, you know, kind of in the bourgeois culture, and that was later a critique of her feminist positioning—but she used a lot of that privilege to create programming that other women could then take and move into areas outside of the city where there was more need. So, [Doria helped facilitate] literacy programs, pro bono representation for domestic law, and women teaching other women about their rights, about why literacy was so important. And then each of those women would teach other women. So for me, this idea of communal activism and a practice of activism that wasn’t just about, you know, going out in the street and protesting, but about practically how we empower each other, practically how we build resistance movements. And that was really, I think, a part of her practice that people didn’t know about.
And I was really interested in thinking about that and learning more about it. So for me, it was a really big learning process about my own history, you know, through [Doria’s] experience. And also, she was a mom and she was …conducting these hunger strikes while she was raising two young girls at home. And [she was] feeling also that the privilege offered her by being able to go to Europe and come back was also a way of her feeling unbelonged in Egypt, and [she was] having these feelings of being an outsider in her own land. There’s this really beautiful poem that [Doria] wrote on one of the boat trips back [to Egypt] called “Oh, My Homeland, Here I Have Returned.” That’s the first two stanzas of it.
So, I was working in particular with this poem, and this is a very rough translation: “Oh, my homeland, here I have returned. Will you welcome me this time with a little more love?”
I really connected with this poem and this feeling. And I hadn’t gone back to Egypt very much at that point, and the few times that I did, [I was] really feeling that kind of distance and unbelonging—both not belonging here in the U.S. nor in Egypt. And so instead of having multiple homes, you actually have none and you’re in that liminal space in between. So, there’s so many levels that are then connected with her work. It’s like how her artistic practice—her writing, her poetry—was completely interwoven with her practice as an activist, both as a publisher and as a person who’s protesting in the street and creating programming and also mothering and teaching. That those things are not, you know, disconnected in our lives. That our identity is really a holistic, fully formed thing. And our calling really is integrated in all the different parts of our lives at once.
ASHLEY Yeah, absolutely. And perhaps “researcher,” covers a lot of what you’re doing, because you’ve obviously done a lot of research on her life and also these other figures over the years. So, it’s great to get this really rich history from you, even though [you’re] not a historian, right? You’ve done a ton of work to bring this history and, I’m sure, you’ve worked with some other people who are trying to do similar things.
And I really love what you said about accidentally stumbling into [Doria] and her archive. I find that that happens a lot with me, and probably a lot to people who are, in general, working with or interested in these buried histories, because the only way into those archives or into those histories is kind of stumbling into them. I can definitely relate to that experience with some of the artists and histories that I’m looking at as well.
“Oh, my homeland, here I have returned. Will you welcome me this time with a little more love?” –Doria Shafik
PART III — Here I Have Returned (2021)
ASHLEY I’m grateful that you mentioned the poem that you were working with, because it’s also the title of some of your art, particularly a site specific work in Egypt. So, my next question kind of bridges into that and I’ll bring us there.
One of those works is about Shafik and it is titled Here I Have Returned. And that was installed on the Pyramids Plateau in Giza, Egypt, in 2021 as part of a larger exhibition, Forever Is Now, which was organized by Art D’Égypte and UNESCO Heritage Sites. I wanted to ask a little bit more about this work in particular, and also the idea that you already mentioned, of location and belonging, which it seems plays a very important role in your art, but also in your life in general. Because this is a site specific work, meaning that it was designed specifically for the Pyramids Plateau in Giza where it was installed, I’m curious what role you think of location playing in your practice as an artist. As someone who moves between, like you said, locations and cultures, between Egypt and the US, and having this hybrid experience. How do you think of location as you work to bring some of these under-recognized histories into a public view?
SHERIN I love that question, and I think it remains a question in my practice. It’s an active investigation for me, and that is what I’m attempting to weave together, you know. I think with every work, I ask that question, I propose that problematic.
With the Pyramids piece and a lot of the site specific work, I always approach with “Why would I make a work here?” and “What is my relationship with this particular place?” and “What story, what histories and communities, are already existing here?” Because a lot of my work is trying to undo a lot of the harm done through colonial practices. I really am trying to think about how my work doesn’t recreate that. And so, for the Pyramid Plateau piece for Forever is Now, it was really an opportunity for me to think about that place as a sacred space and reclaim it from a kind of fetishized tourist industry location, right? [The Pyramids are] something that feel so global… We wear the t-shirts, it’s referenced in culture and mass culture in a lot of different ways. It’s claimed really in a lot of different ways internationally and globally. And there is a whole industry around the site that is really important for the survival of folks who live and work around the Pyramids. And it is also, I think, very extractive.
Again, it really functions through a colonial structure, and so I really wanted to think about how the work can be a platform for folks to interrogate that and really reframe their relationship with the site in a different way, because I needed to reframe my relationship with place in a different way. So, if you normally see pictures of the Pyramids, you’re seeing the front side of the Plateau, which is the Sphinx with the Pyramids behind it, and that’s the main entrance. On your way up, there’s all these little tents and shops and vendors that sell little statues of Pyramids, you know, and the tourist economy around it. I cited the work on the back side of the Plateau where you actually don’t see any of that, but what you do see is the Pyramids against the city, which, again, is not usually a view that folks see the Pyramids, its proximity to urban architecture and life in Egypt. And also, [the work was] really treating it as what it was intended to be, which is a burial site, a sacred burial site. There was a site of a temple, there were rituals that happened around the banks of the Nile that were conducted in this place. And when you visit the Pyramids, there’s almost no opportunity for you to consider any of those things because of the density of the tourism activity. I wanted to pull people further away from that, you know, physically move them away. And a lot of my site-specific work does this, like getting to it physically from a different place.
When you’re having to look at [the Pyramids] from this “backside” of it, you’re really seeing it for what it is, which is, again, a monument to the sacredness of the relationship between life and death and rebirth. On the backside of the Pyramids, too, are three very small pyramids, which are referred to as the Queen’s Pyramids, which is mythology, it’s not actually where the queens were buried, but this idea that the Queen’s Pyramids were these smaller pyramids in the back. So, I was really thinking about site in that way, like how the site itself, the sand, the environment, the history of the place, the rituals that were conducted in there, were going to be incorporated into the work. So, first of all was locating myself in this part of the plateau, which is really important.
The second part was then [answering], “Why would I make a work here? And what would it be about?” I really wanted to take that as an opportunity to connect three different moments in time around the ways in which women’s cultural practice was remembered. A lot of my work I really see as informal monuments to women’s labor. And again, this remembering, as in remembering, but also as in the Toni Morrison “re-membering” version of actually putting back together the body parts and the pieces of our cultural practice. I did a bit of research on the priestesses of Hathor and the ways in which they practice ritual healing and the divine feminine and what those kind of practices entailed, as well as the use of jasmine oil and this musical instrument, which is a sistrum, which is a type of rattle. These were very sacred in those ritual practices. Then I was connecting that with the work that Doria was doing with her poetry as a cultural practice. And then the present day, which is the production of the jasmine oil. In the production of the jasmine oil, women’s labor is really the backbone of the collecting of the jasmine flowers, which happens at night before the flower is wilted. Women go out in the middle of the night and into the dawn to collect these flowers and then they’re processed into jasmine oil, which is then used in the ritual of healing and remembering. So, I like that there’s these three separate things in time that were really connected around how women’s labor is this spine for these industries and how our cultural practice is remembered and visualized.
And so, the piece takes the form of the sistrum that’s kind of like half buried in the ground. It has these fabric elements that are indigo fabric that are embedded with the jasmine oil, and at the end of the fabric pieces, there are symbols, like musical symbols that are actually still used in Coptic churches in Egypt for prayer and practice. And because of the topography of the pyramids, the direction the wind blows through the pyramid plateau goes right onto the area where the sculpture is installed. So, around 3:00 or 4:00 PM every day, when actually the tourists start leaving, the wind passes through the plateau and the instrument gets played by the natural forces of wind patterns. Using sound, vibration, scent, then the scent really becomes more kind of like intoxicating in the air. [I really wanted] the piece to be woven both in form, in concept, and in material and different pieces of it tell different parts of that story. And then all the visual elements are patterns from Hathor’s temple and Doria’s poem is inscribed inside. So, it’s kind of a lot of different things at once, and it’s all coded so different people might kind of access different parts of the work.
ASHLEY Yeah, I’ve seen several great pictures of people at this site engaging with it, so being away from the tourist side doesn’t mean at all that no one’s interacting with it, which I think is excellent. It’s, you know, just different audiences, or like you said, different ways to engage and different levels that are built into the piece that allow for those different engagements. It’s a really excellent work, and I’m interested to see, or hear at least, some of the different ways that it works in real time and engages with the landscape that don’t necessarily come through in images. Those are really integral parts of the piece.
“A lot of my work is trying to undo a lot of the harm done through colonial practices. I really am trying to think about how my work doesn’t recreate that. And so, for the Pyramid Plateau piece for Forever is Now, it was really an opportunity for me to think about that place as a sacred space and reclaim it from a kind of fetishized tourist industry location.”
PART IV — “Before Her Time”
ASHLEY I wanted to turn again to thinking about Doria and buried histories, which your piece Here I Have Returned and so many others dig back up in certain ways and put in the landscape physically for people to engage with. And one thing that I’ve noticed a lot of someone who works with buried, forgotten, and erased histories, is that when histories of progress such as these feminist movements in Egypt that Doria Shafik is so involved in around the mid-20th century, is that when those histories get erased and forgotten, it seems that later generations tend to…characterize those progressive figures of the past as “out of their time,” or “born in the wrong era,” or as historical anomalies in some way. I struggle with that because, as people who research these things deeply, we see the wider movements, we see that these things are happening in many different ways at the time, and that these people were significant, but not so out of character with the period that they’re progressing. I’m curious how you grapple with those kinds of characteristics which I can imagine have come up in your research on Shafik and other figures. How does that shape or change the way that you engage with and try to shape those histories in your art?
SHERIN It’s a really great question because it speaks to the efficacy of erasure: how easy it is to forget, and how easy it is to take for granted where we’re at in the present. I think that that’s been my interest in history in general is, I want to know how I got here.
ASHLEY Yeah, exactly.
SHERIN And, again, the colonialist framing: colonialist framing is about the hero that comes in and saves, and it’s this individual whose work then results in all these things. And there is nothing that Doria could have done as an individual to have been able to successfully do what she did. The reason she was able to do her work is because the generation before her, Huda Sha’arawi and her colleagues, made space for [Doria]. They were meeting in clandestine meetings at their homes and studying literature and organizing boycotts, you know. Then I always think that Huda Sha’arawi’s generation was freeing us within the domestic space, and then Doria Shafik was taking it to the sidewalk and then on the streets, and then also out into the villages. [Doria] started, basically, a parliamentary group that was for women, a women’s rights parliamentary group.
They all did work, and they were teaching each other and they went to villages and they did work in the villages. So, this idea that one person is a linchpin for a movement I think is also very false, and we see that now in the ways that we organize and do the work that we do now. We started the conversation talking about how the work I do as an artist complements the work that you do as a historian, complements somebody else’s work as a filmmaker or a teacher. This is community work, collaborative work. And the work I’m doing right now, I’m working with an archivist and a scholar and thinking about language and language-keeping and what that means. And so, I think the question in itself is a kind of call to action: we have to think about this as each of us bringing a piece of the puzzle that we’re putting back together, and to look for our stories in places that are outside of what’s sanctioned. [We need to look for stories in] suitcases under people’s beds and [we need to practice] remembering and memory and storytelling and oral histories. All of those things become really important, and those are community practices.
And I think another important thing in what you said is that those things are not things in the past. There are remnants of those, there are echoes of those practices—like I was saying, part of the sistrum is still held in Coptic churches, right? We don’t think about that as having a direct lineage to ancient Egypt, but it does. Some of the rituals and the stories and the traditions of language we keep are all interconnected. We just have been, I think, really disconnected from that space and it’s much easier to look through the lens of archaeology because, again, as a colonial construct, it distances you on purpose. It’s intended to distance you from your power, your agency, and your history. But those [histories] are very much alive. They’re just alive in these smaller, informal spaces, in familial stories and small communities. It’s just a matter of giving ourselves permission and agency to remember them and use them.
ASHLEY Yeah, I love the way that someone like Doria Shafik gives us a lens into those past spaces, but we can look outside that lens and see just how much bigger a movement like the ones that she’s involved in are, and how leading up to that moment, like you said, are many other figures that become linked in this chain. Any entry, I think, that is really able to do that work of transporting us in certain ways to a not-very-distant past that’s very easily erased, forgotten, or devalued [is important]…
I’m grateful that you’re able to give us a lens through your art, but also through something like this interview where you’re telling us about Doria Shafik and your own work. So, I’m very grateful to be able to share the importance of engaging with these different histories, because even if they’re forgotten, they’re not completely lost if we can do something about it. That is definitely a call to action that I’m glad you’re taking up in your work and that I’m hoping to take up as a historian and, like you said, [we can] collaborate with a lot of other people who are equally as interested in doing that really important work.
“But those [histories] are very much alive. They’re just alive in these smaller, informal spaces, in familial stories and small communities. It’s just a matter of giving ourselves permission and agency to remember them and use them.”
PART V — Conclusion
ASHLEY Thank you so much. I’m really glad that we got a chance to talk today. I want to invite anyone who’s watching to engage more with HistoReminders online at Now Be Here’s website [www.NowBeHereArt.com] where you can look at all the transcripts and engage a little bit more with the other videos. And I also want to encourage people to explore more of Sherin’s work. Sherin, where is a good place for people to go if they want to see more of your work and engage a little bit more?
SHERIN I think my website [www.SherinGuirguis.com] or Instagram page [@sherin.guirguis.studio] will have a little bit of context maybe for people.
ASHLEY Great. Thank you so much.
SHERIN Thank you, Ashley. It was a lovely conversation.
ASHLEY Yeah, it was great. Thank you so much. I’m really, really glad that we got a chance to share this conversation with more people as well in the interview series. Thank you again. Take care!
❧
This project was curated by Ashley Cope.
Texts lightly edited by Ashley Cope and Kim Schoenstadt.
This project is supported in part by The University of Maryland Art Gallery.