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works by Joachim
Koester
Set-up Installation, 1992
Text, video, 2 slide projectors, 60 slides.
The installation Set-up plays on the spectators willingness and
desire to construct narratives even when it seems almost impossible.
60 "found" photographs, collected from photolabs and photoshops
in Copenhagen, forms together with 16 video sequences, and a text
narration's of a sometimes more and sometimes less credible kind.
The images in Set-up are constantly moving forming new combinations,
and thereby juxtapositioning the machine like time of the installation
with the time spent in the room by the spectator. (it would take
app. 28 hours to see all combinations)
Gentofte
Bibliotek/The Birds Installation, 1994
5 photographs, film still from The birds, 43 newspaper clippings,
2 surveillance cameras, 2 monitors.
In 1994 Joachim Koester did an exhibition at Gentofte Library in
Copenhagen. Five color photographs was hung in the exhibition area.
The photographs showed five different windows which had all been
boarded up with wooden planks. A partition wall was placed in the
space. The wall functioned like an "double arrow", pointing towards
the exhibition area with the boarded up windows and away from this
area at the same time. On the one side of the wall was an enlarged
film still from Alfred Hitchcock's film "The Birds" from 1963. The
film still is from the last scene of the movie: Melaine, Mitch and
Lydia Brenner are on their way out of the house. Melaine is between
the two, wounded with a bandage around her head. Around them are
the birds. On the other side of the of the partition wall was 43
newspaper clippings, all dealing with the city Gentofte's notorious
no to receiving refugees. The newspaper clippings had all been painted
transparent black. A surveillance camera and a monitor was placed
by each of the library's two entrances. The cameras were hung in
such a way that the entrances were seen from a birds perspective.
When looking at the monitors this gave a slight displacement of
the relationship between inside and outside. The different parts
of the installation could be seen as elements forming several narration's.
Narration's which were created by the visual appearance of the installation
and by it's inter textual references - the narration in Hitchcocks
film "The Birds" and the politics of Gentofte Commune.
Rocent/Dawn of
the Dead, Installation, 1994
4 slide projectors, 4 slides, two dissolve units, 25-minute soundtrack.
In 1994 Joachim Koester did a project for Malmø Konstmuseum
in Rocent, a shopping mall just outside Malmø in Sweden.
The installation was built in a separate room at the far left corner
of the mall. Real-sound from the shopping mall was recorded and
mixed with sound from the zombie movie "Dawn of the Dead" (which
also takes place in a shopping mall) to form a 25-minute soundtrack.
This soundtrack was presented together with two pairs of slides
which were projected onto the (covered) windows of the room. These
projections alternately showed the room's two windows photographed
from the inside, and the same two windows boarded up on the inside
with wooden planks. By the means of two dissolve units the passage
between the four photographs was made fluid. At a certain point,
the photo of the window with the view outside and the photo of the
boarded-up window were projected simultaneously, merging to form
one image. Likewise, the recorded sound from the mall would slowly
fade into the sound recorded from the movie and back again. In this
way the installation both documented and dramatized the site. The
installation played on the viewers' willingness to acknowledge a
subtle message of contingent change within the mall itself, and
the howling of the zombies created an ambiguous background for this
passage.
Pit Music
Installation 1996
Stage, pit, Video projection (duration 14 min).
The title Pit Music refers to music coming from the orchestra pit
in a theater and to the set-up of the installation which also consists
of a stage and a pit. Apart from this, the work is video documentation
of a concert in a gallery with a string quartet, sitting in a pit
and playing Shostakovich concert No. 8 110 in C minor, in front
of an audience, which stands on a stage. The concert is shot like
a scene in a film, using several takes, the emphasis on documenting
the interaction between the musicians and the audience. However,
an element of fiction in this relationship is stressed through the
use of two basic 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 relationships.
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, but due to the editing and images in slow 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 is presented
in the exhibition as a video projection in the set-up of the installation.
Day for
Night, Christiania 1996
35 photographs (65,5 x 98 cm).
Day for Night is the cinematic technique used when filming a night
scene during the day. It's a standard technique used all through
film history. The title of Francois Truffaut's film La Nuit Americane
is a reference to this. In his work Joachim Koester has adapted
the Day for Night technique to still photography and made a series
of photographs from Christiania a squatters community near the center
of Copenhagen. Christiania was founded in 1971 by 'slumstormere'
breaking down the fence surrounding 'BŚdsmandsstrľdes kaserne',
occupying an abandoned military base. Within a few years, the appearance
of the base was totally transformed with the original military structure
giving away to a new set of intentions. The idea of the squatters
was to create a city that allowed more personal 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 the Day for Night technique Joachim Koester has created
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
25 years later. The photographs in the projection can be seen as
an attempt to trace these ideas focusing on the spacial transformation
of the place, from military base to 'Free City', as the main narrative.
Row Housing, 1999
20 color photographs, 5 b/w photographs (68 x 88 cm).
The photographs from the series Row Housing document the area around
Resolute on Cornwallis Island in the far north of Arctic Canada.
An area made famous through Sir John Franklin's disastrous attempt
to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. With images of Franklin's
winter camp, abandoned military stations from the cold war, and
the only building realized as part of the Swedish architect Ralph
Erskine's model town - the photographs from Row Housing aim at capturing
the ghost frames resonating in and around the town of Resolute.
The images depict the area suspended between visible and invisible
traces of history, and the newly gained independence as part of
the Inuit state Nunavut in 1999.
Nordenskišld and the Ice Cap, 2000
Computer generated slide projection 36 image slides 69 text slides
4 slideprojectors
The slide installation Nordenskiold and the Ice Cap combines Joachim
Koester's photographs from the Greenlandic ice cap with the narrative
of the Swedish scientist A.E. Nordenskišld's expedition to the same
area in 1870. The Greenlandic ice cap forms a vast space consisting
entirely of snow and ice, in a state of constant transformation
and without any of the features normally used to describe and identify
a landscape. Nordenskišld's expedition marked the first attempt
by a European to explore this part of Greenland, and his previously
unpublished diary gives a fragmented account of the seven days the
expedition spent on the ice. A narrative which together with the
images points to the slippage between landscape, experience and
vocabulary and alludes to the Arctic as a real and imagined space
in western culture.
Bialowieza Forest, 2001
12 color photographs (101 x 126 cm)
The Bilaowieza Forest dates back to 8000 BC. It was never cut or
planted by human hands and it's the only remaining example of the
original lowland forest, which once covered much of Europe. Situated
in east Poland on the border of Belorussia it contains a great diversity
of plants, animals and insects, as well as thousands of species
of fungi and vascular plants, many of these extinct elsewhere. A
fact that makes the forest an important site for research today,
providing biologists with a unique primeval model to study and compare
natural processes. The Bialowieza Forest has been famous for centuries
as the home of the European Bison, and through the years it has
been described in literature and travel accounts as a: Sylvan arcadia,
an asylum, a succor, a pristine Eden, a sacred groove and a dark
and alien impenetrable wilderness. Poles, Lithuanians, Germans and
Russians have mapped the forest as a homeland, a setting for national
identity, utilizing its distinctiveness to illuminate national character.
The Polish poet Adam Mickiewiez imagined the forest as a fortified
shelter, a place of origin and resurrection for the Polish-Lithuanian
nation - the Reichsmarschall Hermann Gšring saw the German occupation
of the area in 1939 as an opportunity to welcome back what he belived
was a pure 'Teutonic Ur-wald', long vanished from German soil, Landscapes
are culture before they are nature, constructs of the imagination
projected onto a specific place. The 12 photographs from Bialowieza
Forest depict a location that through history has been greatly infused
with myths and metaphors. Like his previous works from Chrstiania
and the Arctic, this work can be seen as a continuation of Joachim
Koester's practice in which an imaginary site is paradoxically investigated
through its material reality.
Anna Karina, 2001
4 color photographs (87 x 109,7 vm)
Anna Karina became famous as an actress in 1961 as the protagonist
in the film A Woman is a Woman. During the next six years she stared
in numerous films by Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Visconti.
The 4 photographs, shot within a second, depict Anna Karina standing
in a park. Like four frames from a film, the images create a sense
of movement - of Anna Karina moving her head slightly downwards
to the left. Besides from being a homage to Anna Karina, the photographs
evoke her position as an icon of the French New Wave.
Unpublished texts by the artist
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