At the intersection of myth and memory, you’ll find the work of Cooper & Gorfer. They are an artistic duo whose collaborative vision is as layered and intimate as the women they photograph. Over the past two decades, Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer have developed a language all their own through textiles, collages, and staged photography.
In Hysteria, their recent exhibit at Fotografiska Berlin, the pair asks the questions: Who are we when the world is in flux? What parts of ourselves do we bury to be accepted, to feel safe, to survive? Through their work, they try to answer those questions and reframe what ‘hysteria,’ a word historically weaponized to pathologize women’s emotions, can mean.
Schön! chats with the artistic duo about their latest exhibition at Fotografiska, their creative process, and more.
Your exhibition at Fotografiska feels like a delicate dance between the personal and the political. How do you choreograph this balance without stepping on each other’s toes?
We’ve always worked at the intersection of the personal and political/sociocultural — not as two separate topics, but as entangled threads. The bodies we portray carry both intimate histories and collective memory, and so do we, as artists and as women.
The balance you mention isn’t something we map out in advance — it emerges through trust built over our 20-year collaboration, the tension that arises, and the dialogue that follows. We each bring different instincts to the process at different times. At one moment, one of us might want to lean into dissecting the narrative, while the other might push toward abstraction or myth.
Sometimes we disagree, of course — but we’ve learned to stay with that discomfort and let the work evolve through it. To give each other space to develop an idea or pursue an intuition, even if the other doesn’t yet see where it leads. It’s not a competition, and the goal is never to measure ourselves against each other, but to stay true to the integrity of the story we’re trying to tell.
If your collaboration were a secret recipe, what are the unexpected ingredients that make Cooper & Gorfer’s creative chemistry so unique? And yes, I’m hoping the answer isn’t just coffee!
Well — coffee is definitely in there, but it’s more the ritual of the afternoon break than the caffeine that feels like us. We also both have a high tolerance for uncertainty and are comfortable navigating work that doesn’t resolve easily. What makes it work is that we’re not actively trying to blend into one voice. On the contrary, we’ve come to a point where we embrace and protect our differences. It’s that contrast of sensibilities, of pace, even of cultural background — that creates the friction and richness in the work, keeps our collaboration healthy and alive, and prevents the work from becoming formulaic.
Memory and place weave through your work like an invisible thread. If you could send one photograph from this exhibition as a postcard to your younger selves, what would it say?
We’d probably send one of the pieces where the woman seems to carry an entire landscape inside her. And the postcard would simply say: “You were right to feel everything so deeply. Don’t rush to explain it. Keep going.” Because much of what we do today began in that early sensitivity, not knowing what it all meant, or even why we were doing it, but being attuned to things that struck a chord in us and felt like they mattered, even when we couldn’t explain why.
Photography captures time, yet your images seem to whisper stories that transcend it. How do you invite viewers to linger in this timeless space?
We construct our images slowly, layering them through staged portraiture, textile, drawing, and collage. They’re not documents of a single moment, but rather accumulations. That’s part of what suspends time in our works. There’s also a deliberate ambiguity. The elements aren’t always historically or geographically specific, and that allows viewers to enter the work from different perspectives. We want to create space, not closure — to let the image remain open enough that it continues unfolding the longer you stay with it.
If your work could have a conversation with any artist from history, who would you invite to this dialogue, and what do you think they’d say?
We’d invite Georgia O’Keeffe. Not only because of her artistic language — quiet, symbolic, and resolutely her own — but because of her complex position as both creator and subject. She was photographed extensively by Alfred Stieglitz, often in ways that invited projection. Her paintings, which she insisted were rooted in form and feeling, were repeatedly misinterpreted through a male gaze she neither invited nor controlled.
There’s something in that tension we relate to. We’ve both experienced how feminine visual language — especially when emotionally resonant — can be misunderstood or diminished. In contrast, our work actively seeks to reframe the gaze. We collaborate with our subjects to shape layered, symbolic portraits of women not as seen, but as seeing. Their narratives unfold from the inside out, not through surface or spectacle.
We imagine O’Keeffe would understand that instinct — that she, too, knew what it meant to protect the integrity of her voice, to step away from imposed narratives, and to create on her own terms.
History and contemporary life often seem like strangers in your work — meeting awkwardly, then unexpectedly becoming friends. How do you navigate this dynamic?
We don’t quote history directly. What we work with are emotional residues — gestures, materials, silences that carry the past without naming it explicitly. At the same time, the present is always in the room: in the body of the person we photograph, in their story, in the conditions that brought us together.
What’s contemporary for us is the act of re-seeing. Of reclaiming stories that were buried or misread. When we look backward, it’s not out of nostalgia, but to question whose version of history was preserved — and what still needs to be rewritten, reimagined, or re-embodied.
Our goal isn’t to reconcile past and present, but to let them coexist, sometimes awkwardly. That friction is where new perspectives emerge. We’re interested in how identity is shaped by what we inherit, what we resist, and what we choose to remember.
Collaboration can be a duet or a jazz improvisation. How would you describe the rhythm and flow of your partnership?
Music is a great analogy! We’d say it’s both — and sometimes neither. There are moments when we move in perfect sync, like a duet rehearsed a hundred times. Other times, it feels more improvisational, where one of us leads with instinct and the other follows with trust. Even when performing music that’s been rehearsed, you always have to be attentive, listen, and react to the other. We’ve worked together for so long now that even our silences are part of the rhythm. We know when to push, when to let go, and when to sit in the discomfort until something honest appears.
What’s next after this exhibition? Any secret projects or playful experiments you can tease — without getting me into trouble?
There are always secret threads — ideas scribbled in notebooks, images pinned to our studio walls. We’re definitely exploring new forms right now. There’s a desire to step outside the frame, to let the work spill into the space. Maybe even something immersive. But we don’t rush this shift. Our process is intentionally slow. Some ideas take years to find their form. So let’s just say: something is stirring. And it’s a little wilder than what we’ve done before.
Finally, if your exhibition could whisper one secret into the ear of each visitor, what would you hope they hear?
“You’re not broken — you’re layered.” Every tension, every contradiction, every intensity we carry or inhabit is part of a complex, coherent whole. We hope visitors recognize that their own layered experience is not something to fix or smooth over. We don’t need to be a copy of someone else’s projected perfection. Our tensions and contradictions are exactly what make us present. We’d like viewers to own the shape of their unique makeup and story — with strength, vulnerability, and narrative authority.
Learn more about their exhibit Hysteria at Fotografiska Berlin at fotografiska.com.
Finally, I was wondering about your relationship with the city of Barcelona. How does your perception of the city inform your photography?
