Who are we when everything changes? Which instincts must we suppress in order to belong? In the exhibition HYSTERIA, acclaimed artist duo Cooper & Gorfer invite us to immerse ourselves in an emotional landscape – a place where chaos and clarity, anger and tenderness, myth and memory coexist on equal terms.
Image gallery
Fotografiska Berlin, Außenansicht Eingang
With HYSTERIA, Fotografiska Berlin presents not just an exhibition, but a kind of awakening – a profound reflection on identity, change and the unbroken power of female collective experiences.
Based on almost two decades of intensive collaboration, Cooper & Gorfer have focused their work on female narratives – especially those shaped by memory, migration and uprooting.
Starting from photography, they expand their forms of expression to include collage, embroidery and painting. The resulting works are more than portraits – they are emotional topographies, figurative yet detached, fragmented yet deeply human.
Inspired by the surrealist game Cadavre Exquis, the two artists create visionary goddesses – female hybrids composed of shared limbs, fragmented memories and archaic symbols. These figures do not represent individual identities, but stand for a collective power born of vulnerability. As guardians and troublemakers at the same time, they embody resistance, transformation and radical self-empowerment.
The title HYSTERIA itself is a conscious appropriation – a resistance against centuries of pathologisation. From the Greek origin of the term (hystera = womb) to its medical anchoring in the 19th century and its pejorative use as a cultural stereotype, ‘hysteria’ has long served as a means of controlling and devaluing female emotion. Here, however, the term is reinterpreted – not as a symptom to be suppressed, but as an emotional space to be explored. A place of inner contradictions that are not resolved, but celebrated.
HYSTERIA is myth and magic, chaos of meaning and body poetry all at once – a sensual journey through the many layers of our selves. It's not just about looking. It's about presence. Vulnerability. Memory. And above all: transformation.
About the artists
Sarah Cooper (USA, 1974) and Nina Gorfer (Austria, 1979) are internationally renowned as the artist duo Cooper & Gorfer for their impressive, narrative portraits. Since 2006, they have been merging photography with painting, collage and textile art to create visually complex, mythically charged works that oscillate between reality and fiction.
Their artistic practice is rooted in a collaborative process with their subjects – often women whose stories speak of memory, identity and exclusion. Cooper & Gorfer's visual language gives these stories a poetic form – and creates spaces in which womanhood is expressed in all its facets: fragile and powerful, individual and universal, political and deeply human.
