Trailblazers is an inquiry into Egypt’s feminist history using self-portraiture, performance, and archival artefacts to reclaim and inscribe a counter-history. Geoushy, who was born in Cairo in 1990, was deeply influenced by Egyptian cinema made between the 1940s and 1960s—a period known as the Golden Age of cinema in Egypt and also a pivotal era in Egyptian history—in which women played powerful roles. These portrayals were in stark contrast to the conservative reality Geoushy witnessed the women around her navigate from the 1990s onwards. Responding to this dissonance, Geoushy has built an archive informed by a feminist impulse, amassing popular cultural material depicting and describing acts of female achievement and struggle. From this archive, key names emerge: Egyptian feminist trailblazers in the fields of art, science, law, activism and the military. 

Through performative self-portraiture that visually references the studio portraiture of mid-twentieth century Egypt (particularly that of Armenian-Egyptian photographer Van Leo) Geoushy embodies several of these protagonists, amplifying alternative narratives of trailblazing women—often overlooked by mainstream records in Egypt—and presenting multiple readings of female liberation. Geoushy channels Mufida Abdel Rahman, one of Egypt’s first female lawyers, and Doria Shafik, the feminist activist, journalist and poet, whose 1954 hunger strike, along with colleagues from the feminist organisation Bint al-Nīl (Daughters of the Nile), is credited with winning women the right to vote and to run for elections. Other self-portraits honour the artist and activist Inji Efflatoun and physicist Sameera Moussa amongst others, underscoring women’s contributions across the breadth of Egyptian social and cultural life. Geoushy’s photographs, poignantly offset against archival material that presents an Egypt so unambiguously at odds with contemporary society and attitudes, attempt to deconstruct and interrogate public perceptions of the prevailing power of patriarchy.