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Joachim Koester
Pit Music & Day for
Night, Christiania 1996
July 26 - August
25
It is a great pleasure
to present an exhibition by Joachim Koester. The exhibition will
consist of the two works Pit Music and Day for Night, Christiania
1996. The title Pit Music refers to the music coming from the orchestra
pit in a theatre and to the set-up of the installation which also
consists of a stage and a pit. Apart from this, the work is a video
documentation of a concert in the gallery with a string quartet,
sitting in a pit and playing a Shostakovich concert (No. 8. 110
in C minor) in front of an audience, which stands on the stage.
The concert is shot like a scene in a film, using several takes.
The emphasis is on documenting the interaction between the musicians
and the audience. However, Joachim Koesters intention is to stress
an element of fiction in this relationship using two simple filmic
elements; image and music. They are both narratives as single elements,
but when acting and interacting as each other's counter narratives,
they create a more complex relationship. The relationship between
the music as representation and effect and the images as reality-documents
and carefully chosen and arranged constructions. The music continues
uninterrupted all through the video. However, due to the editing
and images in slow motion and stop motion the music changes between
being represented as what could be termed diegetic and non diegetic
- referring to reality vs. fiction as interdependent concepts, as
well as the idea of showing art and causing a response. The edited
video of the concert will be presented in the exhibition as a video
projection in the set-up of the installation.
The other work in
the exhibition is Day for Night, Christiania 1996. For quite a while
Joachim Koester has been interested in the cinematic technique "day
for night", the technique used when filming a night scene during
the day. It is a standard technique. The title of Francois Truffaut's
film "la Nuit Americaine" is a reference to this. Over a period
of time Joachim Koester has been doing tests, trying to adapt the
"day for night" technique to still photography. The project is a
series of photographs from Christiania, a special site in Copenhagen.
Christiania is a community situated near the centre of the city.
It is one of the only communities in Europe where an alternative
and anarchistic society has developed and survived over a longer
period of time, in part due a large amount of good-will from the
Danish government who consider Christiania a "social experiment".
Christiania was founded in 1971 by squatters occupying a former
military base. Within a few years, the appearance of the place was
totally changed, leaving room for almost every kind of activity,
from ecological kindergartens to a very well-organised marked for
hashish. The intention of the squatters was to create a "city within
the city"; a place with more freedom than anywhere else, and today
Christiania still employs a collective economy and does not submit
to the laws of Denmark. By documenting Christiania through a series
of "day for night" photographs Joachim Koester creates a different
kind of imagery. Day for night: both day and night in the same image.
Like Christiania, dream and reality: the dream of creating a perfect
community compared to the reality of the place. The project is an
attempt to retrace this dream through the reality of the place today.
The project "Day for Night - Christiania 1996" will also be exhibited
in the exhibition "Escape Attempts" which takes place on Christiania
from August 16. The work will be presented in the form of a slide
show and as photographs.
Best Regards,
Nicolai Wallner
Pressrelease from
exhibition at Galleri Nicolai Wallner 1996, Copenhagen
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