Museo Rufino Tamayo, Paseo de la Reforma y Gandhi s/n, Bosque de Chapultepec, 11580 México

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Press Release

From the Secret Garden of Sleep is a solo exhibition of Danish artist Joachim Koester, including six photo-essays, each of them accompanied by a text, created from 2003 to the present. Curated by Magali Arriola, chief curator of contemporary art at Museo Tamayo, the exhibition will also include a video projection and an installation including a 16 mm film.

The series of photographs and texts by Joachim Koester included in his solo-exhibition From the Secret Garden of Sleep explore gaps in the writing and reading of history through the lives and work of various intellectuals and popular figures, from Immanuel Kant and Thomas de Quincy to Charles Manson and Carlos Castaneda by way of Charles Baudelaire. By bringing together these artworks, the exhibition aims to shed light on obscure yet paradigm shifts in society, and specifically, in changes in cultural perceptions. For example, one of the photo-essays included in From the Secret Garden of Sleep addresses the ways society has addressed drug-use, over the course of different centuries,as well as psychological and physiological notions of altered states.Presenting this series of photographs in a country deeply affected by the so-called War on Drugs, as Mexico, will potentially allow the public to reconsider what is or has been, and what’s made of, social and cultural transgressions.

Koester’s revisionist artistic investigations tap into narratives that run parallel, or are sometimes marginal, to mainstream historical accounts. Presented amidst the current politically-charged celebrations of the bicentenary of Mexican Independence and the centenary of the Revolution, From the Secret Garden of Sleep will undoubtedly be an occasion for our local public to reconsider, from a foreign perspective, the present construction of our past. The exhibition also offers a fragmentary gaze on history that will reveal the tension between photography as visual document and the narratives that underlie the material remnants of the past.


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