Karl Holmqvist
Joachim Koester
Hymn to Pan
9 July – 5 September 2010
Opening:
Thursday, 8 July, 7 p.m.
9 July, 9 p.m.
Reading/Performance:
Karl Holmqvist, What’s My Name?
Waldstraße 3
76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
For the exhibition at Badischer Kunstverein Karl Holmqvist made a range of mandala symbols in the form of prints, wall objects, and sculptures, most of them produced on site. Holmqvist translates the pictorial orders of the mandalas into clear graphic structures that also link up with the tradition of minimalism and its formal vocabulary. In their self-contained, repetitive geometrical structures the mandalas are close to Holmqvist’s poems and Spoken Word pieces. In his video ‘I’LL MAKE THE WORLD EXPLODE,’ he operates with analogous techniques of linguistic rhythmicization and repetition. The work borrows lines from Grace Jones’s song ‘Corporate Cannibal,’ in which the Afro-American singer addresses the unbridled avarice of globalized capitalism.
Joachim Koester’s works also involve exploring and experimentally reconstructing rituals. For his film ‘To navigate, in a genuine way, in the unknown necessitates an attitude of daring, but not one of recklessness (movements generated from the magical passes of Carlos Castaneda)’ Koester and a mime artist rehearsed the bodily exercises that the writer and anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, in his book ‘Magical Passes,’ imagines as being an integral component of an old Mexican culture’s practice of magic. Koester’s performative exploration of this bodily ritual treads a narrow line between theatrical reconstruction, filmic documentation, and the ineffable of spiritual transcendence. Koester’s ‘The Hashish Club’ walks a similar tightrope between the strict logic of material actions and experiential spaces that defy rational access. A large-scale installation evokes the atmosphere of the Hôtel de Lauzun, where, in the 1840s, a group of Parisian intellectuals experimented with hashish under the observation of the psychologist Dr. Jacques-Joseph Moreau. Using a range of media, ‘Morning of the Magicians’ also invokes the spirit of a past epoch of the spiritual: Thélèma Abbey, founded by the occultist, mystic, and poet Aleister Crowley in Cefalù, Sicily, in 1920.
Neither Karl Holmqvist’s nor Joachim Koester’s interest in the practices of the spiritual and the occult involve a simple expression of belief in or a naïve invocation of the irrational. Rather both artists reflectively employ their chosen media to a both playfully simulating and analytical inquiring investigation of the cultural authority of the rational.
Karl Holmqvist (*1964, Väterås, Sweden) lives and works in Berlin.
Exhibitions (selection): 2009 – Gaga ARTE CONTEMPORANEA, Mexico City (solo); Argos Arts, Brüssel (solo); Gallerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin (solo); The Malady of Writing, MACBA, Barcelona; Depression, Marres Center for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht; Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, ICA, London; 2008 – Manifesta 7, Trentino, Italy.
Joachim Koester (*1962, Copenhagen) lives and works in New York and Copenhagen.
Exhibitions (selection): 2010 – Kestnergesellschaft Hannover (solo, upcoming); The Power Plant, Toronto (solo); Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum, Mexico City (solo); Gallery Greene Naftali, New York (solo); Animism, Extra City, Antwerpen / Kunsthalle Bern; 2009 – Altermodern, Tate Triennal, Tate Britain, London; If I can’t Dance I don’t want to be Part of your Revolution, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao.
Film program
beyond the frame
In cooperation with Kinemathek Karlsruhe e.V.
With films by Kenneth Anger, James Benning, Stan Brakhage, Larry Clark, Maya Deren, Öyvind Fahlström, Janet Forman, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Guy Maddin, Michael Oppitz, Ulrike Ottinger, Glauber Rocha, Jean Rouch et al.
Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3
76133 Karlsruhe
www.badischer-kunstverein.de
