Joachim Koester

From Painting to Photography: Following the Story behind the Image

Koester became interested in art as a teenager and made prints of Jimi Hendrix and Aleister Crowley in his room. He entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts as a painter, but while exhibiting photographs alongside paintings he realized that he was increasingly drawn to the stories behind the image and to work that combined several documents and spaces.^*1 From the mid-1990s, photography, text, moving image, and installation became his principal media as he pursued subjects in which official history and myth overlap, including Christiania, Arctic exploration, and occult communities.

Using Photography to Measure the Distance between Forgotten Places and Familiar Stories

Past expeditions, rituals, and altered states cannot be photographed directly by a camera operating in the present. Koester reads historical material, visits surviving buildings, empty lots, and plants, and photographs how a place appears to eyes already informed by a familiar story. Morning of the Magicians began when he heard at a party about Aleister Crowley’s former house in Sicily; the process of rediscovering the building on location became part of how the work was read.^*1 Photography measures the interval between material traces in the present and meanings projected onto the landscape by historical sources. The present landscape measures the distance between surviving terrain and the recorded event.

Early research using photography and text expanded in the 2000s to 16mm film, sound, and dance. Film grain, scratches, and the seam of a loop remain visible in both image and projection time, so an image of the past shifts and wears each time it passes through a present apparatus. In Tarantism, a healing ritual described in historical sources is reenacted by contemporary bodies, producing a gap in translation between the written record and muscular movement. Camera Austria has discussed the work as an integration of historical research with the conditions of specific media.^*2

The Boundary among Archive, Travel, and Speculation

In Message from Andrée, surviving material from the 1897 balloon expedition appears beside newly made 16mm footage, display structures, and text. Even as documents accumulate, the expedition’s final days remain uncertain. Diaries and photographs answer some questions, while later heroic narratives fill others; placed in one exhibition, they expose the boundary between fact and speculation. The viewer moves among historical material, present-day film, and exhibition sequence, testing where their own imagination completed the story. ^*3

Tarantism: Reenacting a Bodily Technique from Historical Sources in Silence

Tarantism in southern Italy was understood as a ritual in which a person bitten by a poisonous spider was healed through dance. Drawing on historical sources, Koester directed seven performers in a Brussels studio through convulsions, repetition, and jumps, filming them silently in black-and-white 16mm.^*4 Without music, the movement leaves the format of folkloric reconstruction and becomes a film that tests the hypothesis that history remains in nerves and muscles.

Developing Personal Curiosity into a Filmic Form for Altered Consciousness

Koester has said that his works often begin with a personal curiosity close to a hobby, and that research grows from the enthusiasm of an amateur who likes the subject.^*1 His interests in plants, insects, nightmares, Carlos Castaneda’s movements, and drug culture extend toward substances and techniques that alter consciousness, as well as the social institutions that regulate and commercialize them. For Koester, a camera can record bodies repeating movements associated with hallucination, while hallucination itself remains beyond objective capture. Coarse black-and-white grain, repetition, darkness, and silent gestures disturb the viewer’s perception. Explanations of the subject and sensory simulation remain separate, and the distance between them becomes the film’s form.

Koester travels along routes of historical exploration and photographs surviving buildings, vacant land, and vegetation. Materials from Greene Naftali and SMK describe travel as research into discrepancies between the archive and the present site.^*5 Colonial expedition photography helped visualize and possess territory and other people; his images retain invisibility, delay, and misrecognition. Travel shifts from performing the discovery of the unknown to examining what existing narratives have projected onto a place.

Message from Andrée: The Distance between Recovered Photographs and a Heroic Narrative

The Arctic balloon expedition led by Salomon August Andrée failed, and the bodies and film were discovered decades later. Koester reads the surviving photographs in relation both to heroic images of adventure and to narratives produced by the nation and science after their recovery. His film retains darkness and repetition instead of converting the final moments into dramatic reconstruction. Documentation of the installation likewise records the combination of photographs, posters, and 16mm projection.^*5

Morning of the Magicians: Between Architectural Remains and Occult History

Koester visited the remains of Aleister Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Sicily and photographed its deteriorated interior and surroundings. The work separates material traces in the present from legends that proliferated later, without presenting the ruins as mystical evidence. S.M.A.K. describes the research as moving from the surviving building toward occultism, shamanism, and the unconscious of the body.^*6

The Different Temporalities of 16mm Film, Still Photography, and the Body

Koester assigns each medium a distinct task. He uses photography for still places, film for repetitive bodies, and sound for spatial presence. Kunsthalle Mainz’s The Way Out Is In brought historical, mystical, and archival works together as one environment.^*7 The physical flicker and looping of 16mm resist the recovery of the past as frictionless digital information, adding abrasion and repetition to viewing time.

16mm film carries grain, scratches, flicker, projector sound, and the seam of the loop, emphasizing that an image appears through material. Camera Austria has valued Koester’s integration of these conditions of photography and film with historical research.^*2 Because the point of repetition remains visible, the viewer is aware of the apparatus replaying the image in the present at the same time as the historical scene. A nostalgic appearance and the current moment of projection occupy the same screen.

In Tarantism and works derived from Castaneda, Koester films convulsion, repetition, exhaustion, and movement at the boundary between conscious and unconscious control. In a Louisiana Channel interview, he speaks about the body’s possible contact with a “dark sea of awareness” beyond rational knowledge.^*8 The works identify the source material and the distance of contemporary reenactment, limiting a reading that compresses ritual or Indigenous knowledge into mystical imagery. The body becomes the site where the incompleteness of translation appears; it cannot recover the past intact.

“Critical Nostalgia” Examines the Desire for the Past

Koester’s work is attracted to lost communities, exploration, old film, and ruins. Scholar Paolo Magagnoli has used the term “critical nostalgia” for a method that retains this desire while asking how contemporary politics and representation construct images of the past.^*9 The nostalgic atmosphere and the viewer’s wish to believe it are examined together.

A Documentary Form Assembled from Sources, Present Sites, and Reenactment

Speculative documentary can present verifiable sources, the current site, and the conditions of reenactment while keeping unanswered areas open instead of turning them into conclusions. A dialogue between art and anthropology around Tarantism considered reenactment, bodily techniques, and the spectacle of crisis together.^*10 Koester extends the boundary between evidence and speculation as an experience in time.

Short texts, titles, and excerpts from sources provide an entrance into the photographs and films in exhibition. Text widens the distance between what is visible and the history that has been read. At Kunsthalle Mainz, many projects were connected in a darkened space where visitors assembled relations from fragments.^*7 Images lack the site’s history, while texts lack present atmosphere and repetitive bodily movement. Their mismatch becomes the form of the work.

The critical force of a marginal story depends on how its sources, exclusions, and political stakes are handled. Occultism, drugs, and exploration can be consumed as compelling anecdotes while the specifics of colonialism and class recede. Koester’s work requires attention to who recorded the story and what value contemporary art grants by rediscovering it, alongside what has been forgotten. Political depth depends on more than visual opacity; the selected sources and the colonial or class conditions left in the background also require examination. ^*11

Photographs of places where past events are no longer visible gain historical meaning through titles, brief sources, and exhibition sequence. Materials from SMK and Greene Naftali connect present-day vacant lots and ruins with lost stories as a central method.^*12 Viewers look at the same landscape again after learning the event, yet the frame still yields no decisive evidence. The unease identified in a Frieze review also emerges from the difference between the amount of readable information and the scarcity of visible traces.^*13 Gaps among photograph, text, and exhibition space become a form for historical experience.

At the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Tarantism was exhibited as a work connecting repetitive bodily movement, historical dancing mania, and the loop of 16mm film. The moving image was read as an apparatus acting again on contemporary bodies, with explanatory documentary functions kept secondary.^*14 Materials from Malmö Art Academy, Greene Naftali, Galleri Nicolai Wallner, and Jan Mot document the continuity of a practice that moves among photography, 16mm film, sound, and text while following the margins of exploration, drug history, occultism, and colonial knowledge.^*15*16*17*19

Exhibitions including In the Face of Overwhelming Forces and MoMA’s collection record show that Koester’s works circulate as spatial experiences involving visitor movement and repeated projection, beyond the quotation of photographic documents.^*18*20 In scholarship, “critical nostalgia” describes an attitude that exposes the missing evidence, political power, and imaginative work that produce the desire to recover a lost past instead of simply sharing that desire.^*21