COOPER & GORFER
An enchantingly beautiful exploration of a far-away land. The artist duo Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer are working at the intersection of contemporary photography with painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their photographic installations move fluidly between reality and imagination, technical and artistic interpretation, and collective myth and personal narrative. For their book My Quiet of Gold, Cooper and Gorfer traveled to the rural areas of Kyrgyzstan to collect sagas and stories in conversations and interviews with local inhabitants. Out of these tales, the duo created striking photographic portraits that go far beyond mere documentation to tell and visually interpret romantic-melancholy stories of love, sorrow, and betrayal in a completely new and non-linear ways. Because their carefully staged motifs are then reworked digitally, another layer of fiction mixes with fact and pictorial choreography with photography. This unique blend creates a powerful new whole from the visual and narrative threads so organically and intuitively woven together by the artists.
Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer work as directors, authors, adventurers, researchers, photographers, and artists to create their conceptual and anthropological visual stories of countries and their inhabitants. With this work, they have already established a respected international reputation for themselves. Numerous essays and excerpts accompany the striking images in My Quiet of Gold. An exhibit of the same name took place at the renowned Hasselblad Center in Sweden
in February 2011.
