Copenhagen, Denmark, 1962
Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark
Throughout his seductively nuanced work, Joachim Koester seeks to arrive at what he calls “condensed images” — images (in an expanded sense) that might not so much represent as draw on and ultimately channel qualities, concepts and conditions that lie somewhere beyond the confines of the work’s physical edges.
Koester’s work generally takes the form of an image-based, photo-centric investigation into those elusive and yet ineluctable aspects of consciousness and experience that are manifested in more intangible and ephemeral phenomena such as dreams, spirit presences, altered states of perception and non-verbal forms of communication. In addition, Koester often draws on the subject-matter of historical events in order to investigate the less tidy, non-linear narratives that underlie them.
Working with photography, film, text installation, literary sources, collaborative projects and sound art, Koester’s multidisciplinary practice seeks the blind spots in collective imagery, the disconnects and points of suspension in official discourse, the ambiguous intermediate zones between fact and fiction, truth and not-quite-truth, the banal and the uncanny. Koester himself describes this aspect of his practice as a kind of «ghost-hunting,» that points to «the twilight zone of what can be told and what cannot be told.»
