The Weather Diaries is a stunningly beautiful combination of photo-based art and textile installations. The exhibition explores the identity and roots of western Nordic fashion through a meeting between the artist duo Nina Gorfer and Sara Cooper and 12 local designers and artists from Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands.
This is a unique opportunity to see The Weather Diaries exhibition when it visits Sweden for the first time, having toured all over Europe, the USA, and Asia.
Sara Cooper is originally from the USA and Nina Gorfer was born in Austria; both, however, now live and work in Gothenburg and Berlin. They met via HDK - Academy of Design and Crafts in Gothenburg, and since then have worked together in a particularly close collaboration wherein they nourish each other’s creativity.
Their working method is based on a photographic story-telling tradition that has its roots in the visual art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As opposed to photographers who passively wait for the right moment, Cooper and Gorfer stage and direct their photographs. In close collaboration with the person that they portray, they shape their photographs to capture the immaterial and give form to the stories, fables, and myths that arise from the meeting.
Sara Cooper and Nina Gorfer were the curators of the 2014 Nordic Fashion Biennale in Iceland, which resulted in this exhibition. It is an aesthetic and metaphorical exhibition that deviates from conventional language in the world of fashion. It explores the inspirations and driving forces behind creativity and cultural identity, and examines the inevitable effect that the isolation and forces of nature and the weather have on the environment and people of Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands.
The exhibition radiates creative courage and inventiveness, and conveys something of the magic that so many have been spell-bound by when in contact with these remote northern islands.
Photo: © Cooper & Gorfer-SteinunnBirnaHands, image cropped.