International Artist-In-Residence
New Works 00.2

Joachim Koester

New York, NY

June 08–July 16, 2000

about the artist

New York-based Joachim Koester was born in 1962 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He completed his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, in 1993.

Throughout the 1990s, Koester has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Arnolfini, Bristol (2000); P.S. 1, Long Island City (1999); AstrupFearnly Museet, Oslo (1999); Kunst-Werke, Berlin (1999); INOVA, Milwaukee (1998); Greene Naftali, New York (1997, 2000); and Gallerie Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen (1996, 2000). His work has been including in significant group exhibitions, including P.S. 1’s Greater New York (2000); Organizing Freedom at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2000); Cinema Cinema at the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (1999); Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki’s This Side of the Ocean (1998); Nuit Blanche at the Musee d’Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998); The Louisiana Exhibition, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (1997); and Disneyland After Dark at Kunstamt Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (1996) and Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala (1995). He was included in the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial, Documenta X (1997) and the 1995 Kwangju Biennial.

Joachim Koester’s conceptually-based work examines the narrative conditions of culture, framing their overt as well as their unexplored aspects. Through photography and video, he skews seemingly mundane situations and landscapes with editing, repetition, and shifts in color. Beautiful images entice the viewer, but upon careful inspection, there is discomfort in the images Koester creates; a sense of darkness, of social disorder, permeates his work.

Joachim Koester was selected for his ArtPace residency by the March 1998 panel consisting of Dan Cameron, Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Amada Cruz, Kellie Jones, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Nancy Rubins.

about the project

At ArtPace, Joachim Koester presents a new suite of photographs, Northwood and Other Locations, shot in Texas, installed in an architecturally specific manner. The viewer enters a darkened gallery, facing an unfinished wall in front of a blue glow. Koester’s five photographs are displayed on shelves on the opposite side of the wall, facing a bank of windows that has been tinted with a blue-gray gel. Lit only by the filtered daylight, the windows create a false sense of night, which evokes cinematic conceits. The photographs are sequenced on the shelves implying a modular, temporary system. The subjects of the images imply a minimal narrative, maintaining a sense of ambiguity with regard to time and space.

This manipulation of the viewer’s experience in the space creates a platform for their participation in a construction of a theme. The installation suggests the ways narrative can be changed through environment. The new work expands Koester’s interest in transformation—specifically, the transition of sites and narratives.

Although keenly interested in the cinematic narrative, Koester's Texas work does not emerge from the iconic Western genre of filmmaking. And while previous works have examined specific cultural and geographic events related to exploration and politics, here, Koester avoids a direct historical reference. Rather, Koester evokes the ghosted narrative of the West, where a spirit of expectation—the frontier—is constructed through shifting environments and emotional states.

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