Joachim Koester (DK) - Interview

Berlin Documentary Forum 2, Berlin - June 1, 2012

The interview with Danish artist Joachim Koester was recorded at Berlin Documentary Forum 2, where his work was central to the exhibition A Blind Spot. In the interview, Koester speaks about his work From the Secret Garden of Sleep (2008).

In the interview, Koester speaks about his work From the Secret Garden of Sleep (2008), a series of black and white images of cannabis plants, magazines and texts, which unfolds a story of the plant and its political connotations. He speaks about this creative process and the relation between reality, fiction, the visible and the invisible.

What is interesting in this project is the hidden index of photography, what surrounds an image (..) What my photographs are really about is the secret index of things, or better: the invisible index of things, how things connect in ways that are not quite apparent. Engraved in this plants are all these stories: of the sixties, of Ronald Reagan, of amateur photography, of the botanist who would manipulate the plant, so the very appearance which I describe as somehow alien - is filled with discourses and politics.

To hear more about Joachim Koester’s work, especially his work “Calcutta Served as a Basis for British Expansion in the East” (2005—07), see the presentation Opium, Indigo, Photography by Christopher Pinney at Issue Zero.


 


 
 

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