Poison Protocols and Other Histories

At first glance, Poison Protocols and Other Histories, the debut UK solo exhibition of Joachim Koester, is as impenetrable as its ambiguous title. The prints on the walls appear mundane, eliciting no real response from the viewer. We see such visual feasts as suburban streets, a rundown shack and a marijuana plant. The works' titles serve only to confuse, not clarify; the photograph of the marijuana plant is entitled ‘From the Garden of Sleep’.

In my desperate struggle for clarification and guidance I sought out the exhibition programme, but the opening is as unintelligible as Koester’s works. Curator Lisa le Feuvre writes; “Koester uses strategies of montage archiving and storytelling to illuminate and complicate historical events that form a mythical construction of the recent past." After wading through this dense introduction it is at last possible to reach some clarity and elucidate meaning from his complex designs.

Koester writes a short essay as an accompaniment to each work, but unfortunately it often seems that the works themselves are just illustrations of these ramblings. Like much contemporary art, Koester’s works fail to stand up on their own without being propped up by a thesis.

Koester's writings are dense and in their obscurity leave the reader feeling more drained than fulfilled. His ideas are intriguing, but his works struggle to convey anything of the narrative which is supposedly behind them.