Photo by Anders Sune Berg

Joachim Koester, installation view of "Boarded-Up Overgaden," Overgaden, Copenhagen, 2008.

   November 2008 Reviews

Total Enlightenment

Paul McCarthy

Eleanor Antin

Roger Hiorns

Lorraine O'Grady

Ron Amstutz

Raha Raissnia

Alexandra Grant

Dave Cole

Multiple Modernities:
India, 1905 - 2005

Clare Woods

Gemma Holt

Roger Hilton

The Talamoni Collection

Amelie Von Wulffen

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The mapping of traces and necromantic activity are certainly two of Joachim Koester’s trademark interests, and they both play marked roles in this exhibition in his hometown, which features four older works and one new video. Boarded-Up Overgaden (2008)—a remake of an early work from 1994—consists of boarded-up gallery windows, signifying a spurious absence from the outside and an almost spooky sense of transgression from the inside. Mingling the paranormal with computer-generated chance, Numerous Incidents of Indefinite Outcome (2007) is “a machine that makes art,” in which randomly configured phrases based on a compilation of potential horror plots by H.P. Lovecraft are projected on three different walls. this piece finds a counterpoint in the film Ghost Track (2008), a rapid black-and-white looped montage of imagery from the surface of a meteorite located outside Copenhagen’s Museum of Geology. in a work that triples as a string of inscrutable landscapes, TV static, and a fleeting representation of timelessness, something incommunicable seems insistently lost in transmission. However, this loss unfortunately corresponds to the slightly anemic mood of the show, in which the unintegrated use of technology tends to rob Koester of the finely textured sensibility that usually renders his work greater than the sum of its parts.

"Joachim Koester" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.