MARGATE.- Turner Contemporary opened its 2016 season with works by leading Danish artist Joachim Koester, presented alongside watercolours by JMW Turner. With around 20 works in film, photography and sound installation, this comprehensive display is Turner Contemporary’s largest film exhibition to date.
A unique opportunity to see selected works by Turner (1775–1851) juxtaposed with immersive installations by Koester (b.1962), the exhibition contextualises the contemporary legacy of the gallery’s namesake. Two new black and white 16mm films – one of which is inspired by Turner’s well-documented voyage in which he claimed to have been bound to the mast of a ship to experience the atmospheric effect of a storm – are showcased alongside works produced by Koester over the past 10 years, many of which are being shown in the UK for the first time.
Koester’s atmospheric and often soundless films track the boundaries of the unknown, where fact and fiction cross over. Subtle yet sensuous, these works depict the artist’s interest in physical journeys, psychological exploration and the reconstruction of alternative narratives and forgotten or rumoured stories.
Central to the exhibition is Koester’s new film inspired by the artist’s research into JMW Turner’s psychological journey into the storm. The Other Side of the Sky (2015) is being premiered at Turner Contemporary and has been created especially for the exhibition. Koester’s experiential film examines Turner’s subsequent depictions of storms via the analogy of psychedelic trips. The Other Side of the Sky is being shown within a specially-built structure reminiscent of an abandoned shack, offering glimpses to a group of nine late works on paper by Turner hung alongside it.
Juxtaposing the contemporary and historical, viewers are given a unique perspective on Turner and a chance to view the nineteenth century painter’s later, watery landscapes in a new way.
Koester says: “[Turner’s] trip can be compared to later ‘trips’; the chemical ventures of the 1960s. In both cases the experience of what happened does not lend itself to narrative or representation[,] as many of the impressions hover in the body and are too subtle or too overwhelming to be rendered. Instead Turner creates, through his painting, a space for the multitude of experience to be projected into, and thereby something similar to the psychedelic light shows that accompanied concerts in the 1960s.”
Displayed for the first time in the UK and alongside The Other Side of The Sky is Koester’s first audio work, The Department of Abandoned Futures (2008/2015). Made in collaboration with Stefan A. Pedersen, the soundtrack of white noise and hypnotic voiceover guides the listener through an imaginary city to a vast basement space containing the archive of abandoned futures. Here, visitors are presented with the possibility of an internal journey.
Taking Koester’s interest in the psychedelic as a starting point, My Frontier is an Endless Wall of Points (after the Mescaline Drawings of Henri Michaux) (2007) explores the experience of a trance-like state that is beyond language. Relating to surrealism and based on the 20th century mescaline-drug experiments by Henri Michaux, Koester’s “psychedelic documentary” is juxtaposed alongside Tarantism (2007), where dancers quiver with movements inspired by the Tarantella. First performed in the Middle Ages in southern Italy, the Tarantella ritual or ‘dancing-cure’ was implemented by victims of the wolf spider or tarantula bite to release poison from the body. Michaux’s drawings appear like a musical score for the uncontrollable and compulsive spasms of the dancers as they explore “the fringes of the body or what might be called the body’s terra incognita (unknown land).”
Wandering through a specially built labyrinth, a selection of films made by Koester over the past six years are projected onto wooden structures. Using an archival approach, the works included within this structure continue to explore the limits of the mind and the body and the relationship between the rational and the mystical.
The Hashish Club (2009) is a projection of cannabis plant images, inspired by the notorious Parisian Club des Hashischins; Reptile brain or reptile body, it’s your animal (2012) explores the work of Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowksi, who devised exercises to unlock the ‘reptilian’, unconscious layer of the brain leading to heightened awareness; the body becomes a recording device translating a famous conceptual artwork made in 1974 by Sol LeWitt into a series of gestures in Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (2011); the projector itself is presented as a living, breathing body studied with obsessive attention in Body Electric (2014).
Koester says: “Just strolling through the spaces might be enough for a visitor to get a sense of what is going on. I call this ‘inhaling the show’ – perceiving it through the body. There is also another, conceptual landscape to be discovered… the exhibition comes to resemble a wilderness, a place to stray, to loose oneself only to find conceptual pathways or physical routes to activate the cultural and visual residue that shapes the work’s subject matter.”
Co-produced by Turner Contemporary and Fórum Eugénio de Almeida, Portugal. Curated by Filipa Oliveira with Turner Contemporary.
