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 featuring themes of: » Architecture in Art, » Contemporary Conceptualism, » Dreams / Altered States of Consciousness, » Film/Video, » Danish
© » 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
Gregory Crewdson
2005Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
© » KADIST
Koki Tanaka
2013This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
© » KADIST
Ho Tzu Nyen
2011The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind...
© » KADIST
Luisa Lambri
2002Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
© » KADIST
Ximena Garrido Lecca
2014Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure...
© » KADIST
Mario Garcia Torres
2004Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
© » KADIST
Koki Tanaka
2010Tanaka’s unique understanding of objects and materials is reflected in the four photographs that document his Process of Blowing Flour ...
© » KADIST
Mario Ybarra Jr.
2009Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model...
© » KADIST
Cerith Wyn Evans
2008Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
© » KADIST
Barbara Kasten
2008Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points...
© » KADIST
Will Rogan
2010MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
© » KADIST
Lin Yilin
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
© » KADIST
Luisa Lambri
2007Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...
© » KADIST
Mario Garcia Torres
Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...