To kick-start Camden Art Centre鈥檚 2017 programme, Joachim Koester takes over three gallery spaces with an immersive installation of film, digital video, photography and audio. The collection spans the last 12 years of the Danish artist鈥檚 career, a period connected by persistent questioning into the boundaries of apparent reality and characterised by a quest to uncover hidden aspects of perception. In the Face of Overwhelming Forces follows the theme present in The Other Side of the Sky聽(2016)聽at the Turner Contemporary earlier in the year, with a central focus on motion and the body which highlighted Koester鈥檚 fascination with the subject.
An innovative new film, Maybe this act, this work, this thing (2016) is shown for the first time as part of the display. The commission, in partnership with Auguste Orts and Bergen Kunsthall, enabled the artist to realise a project that has been in gestation for the last decade of his practice. The piece narrates the early beginnings of cinema, using performers to mimic 聽new technologies with their bodies, the juxtaposition of the vaudeville figures and the advancements that threatened the stage industry makes the work incredibly evocative. The simulation of cameras, projectors, quivering electricity and a whirring celluloid, alongside movements which are only amplified by the sounds of muttering voices, echo the dawning revolution of the film industry
In The Place of Dead Roads (2013) the cinematic motif is also evident, the video section deconstructs the western genre and its ritualised gestures. It consists of a surreal encounter between four performers engaged in a circling duel, with trance-like steps reflecting the rugged rhetoric of the stereotypical Wild West. In tune with Koester鈥檚 other work in moving image, the installation is anchored in the idea that histories and forgotten memories are intrinsically built into the human nervous and muscular systems. The practitioner evokes the concept that these buried psyches can be awakened by movement; by collaborating closely with performers, the artist uses these ceremonial movements as a vehicle to open the 鈥渢erra incognita鈥 of the body.
An enquiry into the unknown is also seen in Koester鈥檚 experimentation with other creative disciplines, his photography series and an audio meditation musing on the places that time forgot. In the Face of Overwhelming Forces interlinks individual artworks, each with distinctive narratives, forming a physical journey between each and a gateway into strange and unfamiliar territories.
Joachim Koester鈥檚 In the Face of Overwhelming Forces, 28 January – 26 March, Camden Arts Centre, London. To find out more, visit:
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