BMA Presents New Arrivals: Joachim Koester

Contemporary Wing features three stellar exhibitions of film and photography

BALTIMORE, MD (October 27, 2015)—New Arrivals: Joachim Koester at The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) explores the power of photography to document otherwise lost moments. On view October 28, 2015 through March 6, 2016, the exhibition features Danish artist Joachim Koester’s 3-minute, 16mm film inspired by a tragic 1897 hot air balloon expedition across the North Pole and two large-scale lithographs that appear to advertise the voyage.

For the film, Message from Andrée, Koester photographed the negatives an expedition photographer took of researcher Solomon August Andrée and his team during their fatal three-month struggle following the crash of their balloon. Filled with black stains, scratches, and streaks of light, Message from Andrée not only reveals the forces of time and severe weather conditions that caused physical deterioration to the film, but also evokes the harsh demise of the tragically optimistic explorers. The work is a promised gift from Brooklyn-based collector and National Trustee Monroe Denton.

Joachim Koester (1962, Danish) lives and works in Copenhagen and Brooklyn, NY. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, including projects at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013), the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2012), and the Venice Biennial (2005). The exhibition is curated by Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman.

New Arrivals: Joachim Koester is a part of the series of exhibitions that celebrate the museum’s enormously successful Campaign for Art. The campaign has secured more than 3,800 objects during the past decade in honor of the museum’s 100th anniversary in 2014. Two outstanding New Arrivals exhibitions are currently on view in the Contemporary Wing: New Arrivals: Photographs from the O’Neil Collection and New Arrivals: Late 20th-Century Photographs from Russia & Belarus.

New Arrivals: Photographs from the O’Neil Collection, on view through March 27, 2016, features 18 color and black-and-white photographs that were part of a major gift from Baltimore collectors Tom and Nancy O’Neil, who have collected 20th- and 21st-century photography for more than two decades. Works by contemporary masters such as Dawoud Bey, Richard Misrach, and Abelardo Morell and new talents demonstrate the O’Neils’ interest in images that speak to today’s landscape and environmental issues, as well as portraits that offer sensitive studies of the human experience. The exhibition is curated by Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman.

In New Arrivals: Late 20th-Century Photographs from Russia & Belarus, on view through March 20, 2016, more than 20 photographs by Russian and Belarusian artists capture once-powerful symbols of the eroding Soviet State. These works came to the BMA from Brenda Edelson, who served as the museum’s Program Director from 1973-85. Highlights of the exhibition include Sergey Kozhemyakin’s Transformation of the Image (1990), a series of four gelatin silver prints that are scratched and darkened until the image—a statue of Lenin—is rendered unrecognizable and Boris Savelev’s image of a woman sitting outside in a box-car like device that was hoisted up so she could paint the exterior walls of The State Hermitage Museum. The exhibition is curated by Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs Rena Hoisington.