Cooper & Gorfer. Utopia

When the world around us is falling apart, do we stop dreaming of a different one? From May 9, the Zielona Brama, a branch of the National Museum in Gdańsk, will host an exhibition by the Cooper & Gorfer duo, known for their groundbreaking approach to portraiture, combining photography with painting, textiles, collage, and video. "Utopia" gives a voice to women with migration experience.

The artistic duo Cooper & Gorfer, working in Sweden, consists of American Sarah Cooper and Austrian Nina Gorfer. Their work is a multilayered story about identity, memory, and human experience. Cooper & Gorfer's works have been presented in institutions such as Fotografiska (Stockholm, New York), the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, and the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA).

The starting point for "Utopia" are the stories of eleven young women. The protagonists come from Nigeria, Kenya, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq (Kurdistan), and Iran. Some of them arrived in Sweden during the migration wave in 2015–2016, while others were born there to migrant families.

– The works stem from encounters with young women whose lives are shaped by migration, displacement, and complex personal histories. Instead of directly illustrating their fates, we operate in a multilayered process – combining photography, textiles, and painterly elements to capture the complexity of human experience. As in many of our projects, each work becomes a space where individual experience meets a broader narrative. This is an overlay of the personal with the collective. Although the portraits are deeply intimate for the protagonists, they open up a space for understanding and identification for the viewer – says Sarah Cooper.