Joachim Koester
Poison Protocols and Other Histories

Joachim Koester uses strategies of montage, archiving and storytelling to illuminate and complicate historical events that form a collective mythical construction of the recent past. His works explore the legacies and mine the fictions that form around movements and experiments - be they in the systems of art, mind-altering substances or the occult.

Poison Protocols and Other Histories pays attention to Koester‘s exploration of invisible and forgotten histories of transgression, tracing a line through the artist’s films and photographs. This exhibition takes a journey through stories of Carlos Castaneda’s magical passes and the Manson ‘family’, histories of conceptual photography and the opium trade, as well as the fears and desires of alternative perceptual registers. Each work addresses how history has the ability to not only to reflect experience, but also to construct and create it through speculation. Koester echoes in his investigations the magic at the heart of photography that fold the past into the future and the known into the imagined, a process that arrests time and captures possibilities.
Koester shows four films and selections from six photographic series in Poison Protocols and Other Histories. For Stills he has produced a new series of photographs, Time of the Assassins, investigating the legend of the ‘hashsishns’ – a story embraced by the group of writers mid-19th Century Parisians who formed the Hashish Club. The photographs, as with Koester’s other works, balance between empiricism of technical mastery and subject matter based on speculation in order to explore, both literally and metaphorically, the construction of belief and the possibilities of inventing fact out of immaterial speculation.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/2888