Joachim Koester

Overview of the film and video work by the artist Joachim Koeste

Joachim Koester: Poison Protocols and Other Histories Stills, Edinburgh

Joachim Koester Poison Protocols and Other Histories Joachim Koester uses strategies of montage, archiving and storytelling to illuminate and complicate historical events that form a collective mythical construction of the recent past. His works explore the legacies and mine the fictions that form around movements and experiments - be they in the systems of art, mind-altering substances or the occult. Poison Protocols and Other Histories pays attention to Koester‘s exploration of invisible and forgotten histories of transgression, tracing a line through the artist’s films and photographs. This exhibition takes a journey through stories of Carlos Castaneda’s magical passes and the Manson ‘family’, histories of conceptual photography and the opium trade, as well as the fears and desires of alternative perceptual registers. Each work addresses how history has the ability to not only to reflect experience, but also to construct and create it through speculation. Koester echoes in his investigations the magic at the heart of photography that fold the past into the future and the known into the imagined, a process that arrests time and captures possibilities. Koester shows four films and selections from six photographic series in Poison Protocols and Other Histories. For Stills he has produced a new series of photographs, Time of the Assassins, investigating the legend of the ‘hashsishns’ – a story embraced by the group of writers mid-19th Century Parisians who formed the Hashish Club. The photographs, as with Koester’s other works, balance between empiricism of technical mastery and subject matter based on speculation in order to explore, both literally and metaphorically, the construction of belief and the possibilities of inventing fact out of immaterial speculation

Nothing is written. We all know that. Don’t we

Essay on the work of Paris-based artist Esther Shalev-Gerz, published on the occasion of her solo exhibition at Jeu de Paume. Over three decades Esther Shalev-Gerz has consistently performed a process of unravelling particularities in order to reflect on the ways in which the generalities of history and memory are constructed. Working with a specific place, a certain moment in history, an urgent question, or a shared experience that resonates through history, Shalev-Gerz mines the personal in order to address and interrogate the ways in which the present is understood

Curating Architecture

Curating Architecture is a research initiative set up by the Curating Programme, Department of Art, at Goldsmiths College. Its aim is to interrogate ideas proposed by recent and recurring influences of architecture on curatorial practice through the joint development of critical discourse and curatorial commissioning processes. Curating Architecture starts with the premise that the routines of artists and architects share many practical and theoretical concerns and have entwined histories. It has long been the case that a wide range of artists are influenced by contemporary developments in the architectural field, and that architects look to the conceptual and methodological strategies of artists for ideas, the ‘expanded field’ of practice, described firstly by Rosalind Krauss in relation to sculpture and more recently by Anthony Vidler in relation to architecture, becoming a utopian site for the presentation of objects and scenarios for public consumption

Sea Change

Essay discussing the recent work of Zineb Sedir