Cooper & Gorfer: Between These Folded Walls, Utopia

Description

'What do you hold close? Where is your secret place of belonging? If you had to leave everything behind and begin again, who would you be?' In a series of richly-imagined portraits, the artist duo Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer explore the idea of Utopia in the age of a new diaspora, where young women whose lives have been influenced by forced migration, are photographed like goddesses inside lustrous sets. These vivid portraits are a judicious and of-the-moment examination of our historical memory and possibility. Cooper & Gorfer intertwine photographic portraiture with beautifully executed collage techniques and hand-drawn textures, blending photography and painting in their series, Between These Folded Walls, Utopia. This book lets us delve into a colourful utopian theater, celebrating female power, and inviting us to partake in the emotional dance of hardship, hope and transformation.

Sarah Cooper (b.1974, US) and Nina Gorfer (b.1979, Austria) have been collaborating since 2006 and work in Gothenburg, Sweden. Their work has been shown at the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen, NOMA New Orleans Museum of Art, Nuuk Art Museum in Greenland, and Fotografiska Stockholm among others. In 2018, Cooper & Gorfer won the prestigious German Photo Book award for their monograph I Know Not These My Hands.