Joachim Koester: Hypnagogia

Joachim Koester’s first solo exhibition in Canada comprised three black and white 16 mm films: Tarantism (2007), My Frontier is an Endless Wall of Points (after the mescaline drawings of Henri Michaux) (2007) and 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) (2009).

Through the trope of hypnagogia - the threshold between consciousness and sleep - this trio of works suggested conscious and unconscious states and gestures, irrationality, loss of control, possession, and the "fringes of the body" that Koester terms "the grey zone."

Dancers wearing everyday clothes convulse and gyrate, enacting symptoms of a spider’s bite in a riff on the Southern Italian dance called the tarantella; a man mimes actions that channel shamanic gestures; abstract squiggles evoke the experience of writing after consuming mescaline.

Curated by Helena Reckitt.