Starting in the mid-1990s, Joachim Koester developed an oeuvre that could be described as a complex web in which journalistic and historical research fuses with personal and fictive narratives. He belongs to an artists_ generation whose practices are based on what Hal Foster once described as the _archival approach._ Balancing the thin line between documentary and fiction, Koester_s films, photos, and installations reexamine and activate forgotten histories, failed utopias, and the obsolete. In his work, bygone counter-cultural movements reemerge in the same way that geographical and spiritual journeys are retraced. Joachim Koester: Of Spirits and Empty Spaces is published to accompany five independent, complementary exhibitions of the work of Joachim Koester, at Institut d_Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; S.M.A.K., Ghent; and Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneve.