My Cleopatras, 2024

In several series of staged photographs, Sherry Wiggins takes on the infamous Cleopatra VII, Thea Philopator, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt. How do you portray a historic female figure who has been both celebrated and reviled? In the triptych Cleopatra Snake Wrangler, Cleopatra / Wiggins wrestles with a snake; in the Cleopatra at the Café series, she is world weary; in Cleopatra with a Snake and a Cigarette, she is indomitable. In The Death of Cleopatra (for Jean-Baptiste Regnault), based on Regnault’s 1796 painting of the same name, she reclines bare breasted. These images balance seriousness and humor as Wiggins reveals her own version of Cleopatra in her somewhere-in-her-late-sixties form.

These images are part of the HEROINES project, where Wiggins researches significant women from biblical, classical, literary and historical sources, such as Eve, Salome, Helen of Troy, Circe, Sappho, the goddess Isis and others, then enacts them in performative photographs taken by Luís Branco.

(photography by Luís Branco, installation shots by Robert Kittila)