Cooper & Gorfer’s HYSTERIA Turns Emotional Chaos Into Divine Power

Fotografiska Berlin is about to be possessed. Since June 13, 2025, HYSTERIA — a hallucinatory new exhibition by the surrealist queens of emotional portraiture, Cooper & Gorfer — has taken over the space. With their signature fusion of photography, collage, embroidery, and painting, the duo doesn’t just tell stories — they fracture them, layer them, and stitch them back into myth.

This isn’t an exhibition. It’s an invocation.

Between Goddess and Ghost

Inspired by the surrealist game Cadavre Exquis, HYSTERIA conjures female figures spliced from memory, myth, and motion — women who aren’t whole in the traditional sense, but godlike in their fragmented, kaleidoscopic beauty. Limbs float. Eyes overlap. Emotions throb beneath embroidered scars. These portraits don’t just depict identity — they disassemble it and rebuild it from the wreckage of generational displacement and desire.

And the title? A middle finger to centuries of misdiagnosis. Hysteria is no longer a weapon used to silence women — it’s the raw terrain they walk barefoot through, claiming every tremble, every scream, every transformation.

The Power of Being Too Much

Cooper & Gorfer have spent the last two decades exploring what it means to be a woman in flux — a body marked by memory, trauma, and collective resilience. In HYSTERIA, that legacy deepens. These portraits are not passive. They ask for your discomfort. Your goosebumps. Your reckoning.

Curated by Thomas Schäfer in collaboration with the artists, HYSTERIA runs through October 12, 2025. If you’ve ever felt too sensitive, too angry, too much — this is your temple.