Sent out 26 September 2018

Stories about cannabis, insects, the credit crunch and polar expeditions. Opening on 11 October, SMK presents an exhibition featuring the works of Joachim Koester. Through photography, sound and video, he explores hidden aspects of the mind and of our collective history. The exhibition has been planned in close co-operation with the artist.

His keenly honed sensibility towards the narratives that underpin our present era has paved the way for a substantial international career for Danish artist Joachim Koester. He is represented at MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) in Copenhagen.

Now, the Royal Graphic Collection at SMK presents the exhibition Joachim Koester – Pattern, Shimmers, Scenes: a journey through human consciousness and our collective history, as told over the course of six rooms. The journey begins with humanity’s quest to get in touch with hidden, possibly suppressed layers of our consciousness with the aid of hallucinogenic substances. Koester’s photographs from the series From the Secret Garden of Sleep feature images of cannabis plants, brimming with sap, promising precisely such an expansion of one’s consciousness. The potent plants also refer to the story of Ronald Reagan’s ban on cannabis in 1982, which inadvertently served to increase interest in cannabis among amateur botanists, prompting them to develop an entirely new super-plant with even more potent properties.

Whereas From the Secret Garden of Sleep is about cannabis, the work Nanking Restaurant. Tracing Opium in Calcutta points to another consciousness-expanding substance: opium. Koester explores and identifies his own method through a wealth of historical figures, including the writer Thomas De Quincey, whose 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater describes how memories that lie deeply lodged within one’s consciousness can surface when intoxicated by opium. How opium can conjure up forgotten images from the remote nooks and crannies of the mind.

From inner to external journals

The human mind contains strata of forgotten memories. Similarly, urban settings feature many sediments: the embedded remnants of the greed and dreams of past generations. Koester began his series Some Boarded Up Houses in the wake of the credit crunch of 2007–09. Living in New York at the time, Koester was struck by the fact that a crisis prompted by a property bubble on the American market came very close to shutting down Denmark’s largest bank. Koester compares the boarded-up houses with insect husks caught up in the cobweb of transactions that make up our present-day global economy.

The boarded-up houses constitute physical memorials to a collapsed global economy. Similarly, the empty spaces of urban settings can speak eloquently of the dreams of previous generations – dreams that either took root and flourished or withered away. In 1970, American artist Ed Ruscha photographed a range of empty building sites in Los Angeles in order to illustrate the city’s great potential. Almost forty years later, Koester photographed the same sites, but with far less optimism. The formerly empty sites had been sold and developed, and Koester himself stated that photographing these sites was like ‘taking part in an archaeological dig of the opportunities we have lost, a future we have abandoned’.

About Joachim Koester

Artist Joachim Koester was born 1962 in Copenhagen. He graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ Schools of Visual Arts in 1994. Working primarily with photography, sound and video, he is part of the so-called 1990s generation of Danish artists who made a strong impact on the international art scene. Koester has exhibited his work at a wide array of major art institutions abroad.

Art critics wishing to view the exhibition prior to the official opening are kindly asked to contact head of press Karen Ormstrup Søndergaard, T +45 2552 7203, M kos@smk.dk