Joachim Koester
The place of dead roads
The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève presents The Place of Dead Roads, a solo exhibition by Joachim Koester featuring a new video installation, coproduced by the Centre, and an extensive collection of photographic works undertaken between 2003 and 2012.
Using video, 16mm film, installation and photography, Koester’s work explores those troubled interzones between conscious and unconscious, the occult and the rational. The body and the notion of performance are recurring themes in his work. Koester is a conceptual, experimental artist who dramatizes the human body and creates a language of movement and gestures that evoke questions of trance and possession.
Joachim Koester’s exhibition at the Centre will feature a new video, surrounded by a huge installation in the form of tunnels and rooms made out of fragments of wood and occupying one whole floor of the building. Shot inside the installation, the film uses codes borrowed from the Western and presents four characters whose expressions and gestures suggest a ritualized duel. As the actors switch from miming attack and defense to tribal gesticulations, the effect is of a state of trance in which the body seems like a suit of armor the protagonists are trying to pierce. The title of this work, The Place of Dead Roads, is also the title of the exhibition and is taken from a novel by William S. Burroughs.
The Centre’s third floor will be given over entirely to Joachim Koester’s photographic work. Koester took up photography in the 1990s and has developed a body of work that sits between documentary archive and artistic fiction. His different series of images reveal a particular interest in the mysteries surrounding forgotten episodes from history and in occult phenomena, such as The Magic Mirror of John Dee, which documents the magic mirror of a 16th-century English mathematician and astrologer.
Joachim Koester is an artist born in 1962 in Copenhagen, Denmark. His works have been shown at Documenta X, Kassel; at the Johannesburg Biennale; the Kwangju Biennale; the Venice Biennale; the Busan Biennale; the Manifesta, Trento; Tate Triennial, London; Taipei Biennale, Taiwan; as well as in solo shows at Centre national de la photographie, Paris; Statens Museum for Kunst Copenhagen; CASM, Center d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; The Power Plant, Toronto; Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover; IAC,Villeurbanne; MIT, Boston; Charlottenborg Copenhagen; S.M.A.K, Ghent; and Camera Austria, Graz.
Curated by Andrea Bellini
