Cooper & Gorfer

Who are we when everything is shifting? What instincts do we bury to belong? With Hysteria, artist duo Cooper & Gorfer invite us into an emotional landscape where chaos and clarity, tenderness and rage, myth and memory coexist. Hysteria is both an exhibition and an invocation – an exploration of identity, transformation, and the power of collective female experience.

The title Hysteria itself is a reclamation. Long used to pathologize and marginalize women – the term is reimagined as a space of power and depth. Hysteria is no longer a condition to suppress but an emotional landscape to explore – an inner space where contradiction is not only allowed but essential.

The artists take inspiration from the surrealist game Cadavre Exquis, crafting towering female deities composed of shared limbs, disjointed memories, and mythic iconographies. In their fragmented beauty, they become both guardians and disruptors – embodying resilience, metamorphosis, and radical selfhood.

Hysteria is a place of myth and magic, of mess and meaning – a deeply sensory journey through the layered dimensions of selfhood. It does not ask for passive observation, but for presence. For vulnerability. For memory. And above all, for transformation.

Credits

The exhibition is curated by Thomas Schäfer (Associate Director of Exhibitions) in collaboration with the artists.