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? As the world around us is unravelling, have we stopped dreaming of another?
In a series of richly-imagined portraits, the artistic duo Sarah Cooper & Nina Gorfer explore the idea of Utopia in the age of the new diaspora. Young women who have been forced to uproot their lives are photographed like goddesses inside lustrous and surrealist-inspired sets. These vivid portraits are a judicious and of-the-moment examination of our historical memory and possibility. Between These Folded Walls, Utopia is on view at Fotografiska New York.
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.