Museo Tamayo Renewed Paseo de la Reforma y Gandhi s/n Bosque de Chapultepec 11580 México Mexique
From the Secret Garden of Sleep is a series of portraits of home-grown cannabis plants, echoing the centrefolds of 1970s magazines such as High Times or Sinsemilla Tips. This sub-genre of plant photography is an anthropology of potent projection on to this ever mutating plant, promising journeys to another state of consciousness.These objective, formal images recall the documentary nature of the history of conceptual photography.
In the series Histories Koester retraces the sites captured by canonical artists and photographers, including Robert Adams, Gordon Matta- Clark and Bernd & Hilla Becher to present two histories: that of conceptual photography, and that of the places and events depicted. These diptychs reveal spaces captured and then reproduced in publication alongside an image of that same location taken by Koester. In one image, a house Ed Ruscha photographed in shows a sign 'Now Renting'. In Koester's return to the site, a slightly bigger sign reads 'Now Leasing'. The distance invokes a time travel via moments of photography from the past that still hold currency, with the doubling evidencing temporal change filled with an uncomfortable nostalgia for something now invisible. Just like the myths of drug culture, this process renders fact as unreliable as fiction.