Tarantism
2007 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
9,17 min
Joachim Koester
Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula. This bite caused various symptoms, such as nausea, difficulty to speak, delusion, excitability and agitation. The victims suffered then from convulsions and the only way to heal them was to engage in a frenzied dance, as it was believed. Called “Tarantella”, this dance, appeared during the Middle Ages and was danced all along the 19th century. To make this video, the artist asked a group of dancers to perform this uncontrolled dance in order to explore this borderline mental and physical state, close to a trance. Tarantism represents a transition in the artist’s work, who brings a story back to life simply through the movement of these completely disarticulate bodies, without referring to images extracted from reality, thus exploring a purely mental territory.
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 artists 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.
Colors:
Related works of genres: » video artists
» see more
© » KADIST
Haris Epaminonda
2007Created from extracts of kitsch movies or Greek soap operas from the 1960s, these videos are like audiovisual ‘postcards’ reflecting a nostalgic and melancholic approach...
© » KADIST
Haris Epaminonda
2007Haris Epaminonda’s work questions the manipulation and the flow of images as well as their power of fascination...
© » KADIST
Walid Raad
2009“The Lebanese wars of the past three decades affected Lebanon’s residents physically and psychologically: from the hundred thousand plus who were killed; to the two hundred thousand plus who were wounded; to the million plus who were displaced; to the even more who were psychologically traumatized...
© » KADIST
Walid Raad
2022For his first NFT release artist Walid Raad made a series of animated birthday cakes, titled Festival of Gratitude , for some of the world’s most toxic and larger-than-life leaders...
Related works featuring themes of: » Architecture in Art, » Contemporary Conceptualism, » Dreams / Altered States of Consciousness, » Film/Video, » Danish
» see more
© » KADIST
Vincent Leong
2012The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
© » KADIST
Yee I-Lann
2013Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
Other related works, blended automatically
» see more
© » KADIST
Vincent Leong
2012The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
© » KADIST
Koki Tanaka
2013This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
Other works by: » Joachim Koester
» see more
© » KADIST
Joachim Koester
2006Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...
Related artist(s) to: Joachim Koester » Harun Farocki, » Keren Cytter, » Jimmie Durham, » Marcel Broodthaers, » Natascha Sadr Haghighian, » Angela Melitopoulos, » Anselm Franke, » Ken Jacobs, » Luis Jacob, » Walt Disney
» see more
© » KADIST
Harun Farocki
2009For Immersion , Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations...
© » KADIST
Keren Cytter
“Untitled” is inspired by the movie “Opening Night” by John Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands playing the role of a fallen woman, anguished by her distressed life...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » KADIST
Arash Fayez
2021The short film I Can Only Dance to One Song by Arash Fayez features a series of people from the migrant community in Barcelona singing along or dancing to songs of their choosing...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Weekly Picks: Indonesia (2 - 8 July 2018) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Indonesia July 2, 2018 Top Picks of Indonesia art events in Bandung and Jakarta from 2 – 8 July 2018 Dance lovers and practitioners, we have several dance events in Jakarta and Bandung for you to choose from...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
On the Indonesian Dance Festival with Maria Darmaningsih | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles October 25, 2018 As part of ArtsEquator’s series of interviews profiling festival directors in Southeast Asia, we get to learn more about Maria Darmaningsih, co-founder and current artistic director of the bi-annual Indonesian Dance Festival (IDF), which was launched in 1992...