Europe

Joachim Koester

HOWE

2013

HOWE, 2013 (still)

Joachim Koester’s HOWE merges historical narrative with conceptual exploration. The piece draws its title from Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, and delves into themes of industrialization, innovation, and the uncanny. Koester employs a multi-layered approach, combining photography, text, and installation to create a haunting, immersive experience. The artwork features images of disassembled sewing machine parts, meticulously arranged to suggest both the ingenuity and the mechanical disquiet of the industrial era. The stark, detailed photographs evoke a sense of dislocation, where the familiar becomes strange and the past reverberates through the present. Koester’s integration of textual elements provides historical context, enriching the visual narrative and prompting viewers to reflect on the broader implications of technological advancement. HOWE is a meditation on the intersection of human ingenuity and the mechanization of labor, highlighting the eerie beauty and complexity of industrial progress.

With a keen interest in the stranger corners of the long human story, and a persistent interest in the supernatural, the transcendent, and the psychedelic, Joachim Koester's work follows the artist’s own undying interest in physical and psychological limits. While exploration was a matter of crossing geographies before the 19th century, the 20th century brought the mental exploration of our unconscious, hastened by the discovery of psychoanalysis. Koester is interested in visualizing specific events—those forgotten, overlooked, or suppressed by the official historical record—in order to reintroduce them into collective memory. Using 16mm documentary films, photographic series, or books, his work transforms stories into images and vice versa, appearing as a quest for the invisible and the vanishing.

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Joachim Koester HOWE

Joachim Koester

HOWE