Alternating Realities
Joachim Koester's work is usually found within the context of public institutions. It is thereby placed in direct relation to the collective function these institutions fulfill as architectural containers of a social microcosm within a larger social context.
In willfully adding physical and metaphorical barriers at a precisely chosen moment in time Koester introduces a temporal focus point, a freeze framed moment at which the rules of the exchange between inside and outside are altered and another, different meaning of that exchange comes into being.
The insertion of filmic quotations, like Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", or the soundtrack to George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead", effectively lead to a dramatization of the internal space. It acquires a subtext of danger, since the clips chosen are taken from the genres of the psychological thriller or the horror movie. The interior space thus manipulated is now interacting with the exterior space, i.e. the direct context or the surrounding cityscape, according to the rules of the author.
In this confrontation between the individual artist Koester and the surrounding context the work is suspended and freeze-framed. The orchestrated fusion of internal, manipulated reality and external reality is left without further resolve. This tension of two simultaneous conscious truths, an imported and an exported one, penetrating one another metaphorically and physically through the tiniest of gaps left between the roughly attached planks, reveal the climatic nature of Koester's work. The expected catharsis, however, is left out. It is frozen at the point of conflict, just as the selected filmclips will simply present any evolutionary moment of the film in question, never though, the end.
Extract from Bea de Souza,
Alternating Realities (cat.) London, April 1995.
-All documention is from the installation Gentofte Bibliotek/The Birds, 1994.
-Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner.