CANCELLED!

Unfortunately the Sherin Guirguis lecture is CANCELLED due to circumstances beyond anyone's control.

My Place Is the Placeless

Egypt-born, Los Angeles–based artist Sherin Guirguis discusses her work, which investigates narratives and histories that have often been forgotten, marginalized, or erased. Using a specific site, related text (poems, biographies, songs), and historical research as the core of each series, Guirguis develops projects that engage audiences in a dialogue about power, agency, and social transformation through art.

Bio

Sherin Guirguis was born in Luxor, Egypt in 1974. She received her BA from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Raised in Cairo, she lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She is Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Art at the University of Southern California. Guirguis has had solo museum exhibitions at the Crafts and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles (2018), the American University’s Tahrir Cultural Center, Cairo (2019) and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2013). Her work was features in Desert X 2017 and has also been shown internationally in Dubai and Sharjah, UAE; Gudalajara, Mexico; Frankfurt, Germany and Venice, Italy. Guirguis’ artworks are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Orange County Museum of Art; the Houston Museum of Fine Art; and the Las Vegas Museum of Contemporary Art. Her art has also been acquired by the Public Art Commission of the Metropolitan Authority of Los Angeles and by the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Her work investigates narratives and histories of people that have often been forgotten, marginalized and/or erased. Using a specific site, a related text (poems, biographies, songs, etc) and a recovered history as the core of each series, she develops projects that engage audiences in a dialogue about power, agency and social transformation through art. The research for each project involves studying available archives as well as interviewing community members and leaders. This research leads to explorations of architecture, text and narratives that I then translate into artworks that re-activate these lost narratives and create access to these lost stories.The connection between the materials and formal aspects of the work and the content are crucial to retelling these histories. The materials, colors and patterns are the visual language through which viewers can access these lost histories.

For more information, visit artsdesign.berkeley.edu.

Presented by the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice.