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press release
- Joachim Koester
March 2 - April 20 2002,
Opening Saturday March 2 from 16-18
It is a great pleasure
to present an exhibition with new works by Joachim Koester.
In the Main Gallery
we show The project Bialowieza Forest.
The Bilaowieza Forest dates back to 8000 BC. It was never cut or
planted by human hands and it's the only remaining example of the
original lowland forest, which once covered much of Europe. Situated
in east Poland on the border of Belorussia it contains a great diversity
of plants, animals and insects, as well as thousands of species
of fungi and vascular plants, many of these extinct elsewhere. A
fact that makes the forest an important site for research today,
providing biologists with a unique primeval model to study and compare
natural processes.
The Bialowieza Forest has been famous for centuries as the home
of the European Bison, and through the years it has been described
in literature and travel accounts as a: Sylvan arcadia, an asylum,
a succor, a pristine Eden, a sacred groove and a dark and alien
impenetrable wilderness. Poles, Lithuanians, Germans and Russians
have mapped the forest as a homeland, a setting for national identity,
utilizing its distinctiveness to illuminate national character.
The Polish poet Adam Mickiewiez imagined the forest as a fortified
shelter, a place of origin and resurrection for the Polish-Lithuanian
nation - the Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring saw the German
occupation of the area in 1939 as an opportunity to welcome back
what he believed was a pure 'Teutonic Ur-wald', long vanished from
German soil.
A belief that had fatal consequences for the local population of
Bialowieza.
Landscapes are culture before they are nature, constructs of the
imagination projected onto a specific place.
The 9 photographs from Bialowieza Forest depict a location that
through history has been greatly infused with myths and metaphors.
Like his previous works from Chrstiania and the Arctic, this work
can be seen as a continuation of Joachim Koester's practice in which
an imaginary site is paradoxically investigated through its material
reality.
In the project space we show the work Anna Karina.
Anna Karina became famous as an actress in 1961 playing the protagonist
in the film A Woman is a Woman. During the next six years she stared
in numerous films by Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Visconti.
Joachim Koester's 4 photographs, shot within a second, depict Anna
Karina standing in a park. Like four frames in a film, the images
create a sense of movement - of Anna Karina moving her head slightly
downwards to the left. Besides from being a homage to Anna Karina,
the photographs evoke her position as an icon of the French New
Wave.
During the last years Joachim Koester has been exhibiting at Documenta
X, Kassel, Centre National de la Photographie, Paris,
Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, Kunstwerke, Berlin, PS
1 Centre of Contemporary Art, New York, Astrup Fearnley Museum,
Oslo, MCA, Chicago, Malmo Konst Museum, Malmo, Moderna
Museet, Stockholm, Kunsthalle Wien, Wien, Van AbbeMuseum,
Eindhoven,
Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Kölnischer Kunstverein,
Cologne, Museée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris,
Paris, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Johannesburg
Biennale, Johannesburg,
Louisiana Humlebaek, Kwangju Bienale, South Korea.
February 27 2002 Joachim Koester will open a solo exhibition at
Kunsthalle
Nurnberg, Germany.There
will be published a retrospective catalogue in connection to that
exhibition, for orders please contact Kunsthalle
Nurnberg.
If you have any questions
please take contact and we will be very pleased to assist you. We
welcome you in the gallery.
Kind regards
Nicolai Wallner
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