Fotografiska goes St Barth
Fotografiska is proud to bring Cooper & Gorfer’s powerful exhibition 'Between These Folded Walls, Utopia' to The Wall House Museum in St Barth. From 28 February to 18 April 2026, experience a stirring photographic series on migration, resilience, and the right to dream, created by Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer. The exhibition has deeply moved communities across our museums in New York, Stockholm, and Tallinn, and we’re excited to see it resonate in a new cultural setting.
What do you hold close? Where is your secret place of belonging? If you had to leave everything behind and begin again, who would you be? Humanitarian tragedies caused by wars and the all‑encompassing effects of climate change keep unfolding, creating immense human suffering and migration. The danger now is: Will we stop trying to imagine a better world?
Struck by this realisation, that we are living within a loss of Utopia, Cooper & Gorfer reached out to their local communities and interviewed young women whose lives had, in one way or another, been ruptured by the effects of forced migration. They asked them about their dreams, their identity, and their secret places of longing.
Between These Folded Walls, Utopia, emanates from the current political reality. With a deep interest in the human story, the artists imagine a playful future, reminding us that we are all caught in the imaginary world of our own interpretations and cultural conditioning. The protagonists in Cooper & Gorfer’s portraits are drawn from this new diaspora—a young generation of women who have experienced what it means to uproot their lives and sense of self. They appear like goddesses, surrounded by an entourage of helpers and assistants. The vivid portraits offer a judicious, tough‑minded examination of our historical memory and possibility.
But the exhibition extends far beyond portraiture. The artists invite us to partake in their utopian continuum of surfaces and woven structures—of architecture and nature—where we find ourselves caught in an unending enclosed space of walls, gardens, and doorways. Inspired by the multilayered, non‑linear narratives of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinths, Cooper & Gorfer simulate architectural elements that were once built with utopian intentions.
The women inhabiting this illusionary world are integrating themselves, removing themselves, inserting themselves, or cutting themselves out of this labyrinthine coulisse. They are adorned with small personal items from former lives, safely grasped in their hands, tied in their hair, clasped around their arms, or tucked into crevices within their portraits. Through naïve cuts and collage elements, Cooper & Gorfer construct various layers of physicality within each work, acting like the many-layered backdrops of a theatre stage.
This is a world where anything seems possible; where the seemingly surreal becomes entirely believable. Caught in a maze of walls and projected realities, each girl’s environment may be built, torn down, and rebuilt differently, yet it remains inherently constructed and therefore a theatrical image of reality, never reality itself.
Where? The Wall House Museum, 2 rue de Pitea, La Pointe, Gustavia, 97133 St Barth - FWI
When? 28 February 2026 – 18 April 2026
Free admission for Fotografiska Members!
Photo: The Envious Bodies, 2020 © Cooper & Gorfer