Joachim Koester

Book excerpt: Starting in the mid-1990s, Joachim Koester developed an oeuvre that could be described as a complex web in which journalistic and historical research fuses with personal and fictive narratives. He belongs to an artists generation whose practices are based on what Hal Foster once described as the archival approach. Balancing the thin line between documentary and fiction, Koesters films, photos, and installations reexamine and activate forgotten histories, failed utopias, and the obsolete. In his work, bygone counter-cultural movements reemerge in the same way that geographical and spiritual journeys are retraced. Joachim Koester: Of Spirits and Empty Spaces is published to accompany five independent, complementary exhibitions of the work of Joachim Koester, at Institut dArt Contemporain, Villeurbanne; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; S.M.A.K., Ghent; and Centre dArt Contemporain, Genève.