jonathan joosten - artist - official website

about

Jonathan Joosten is a German-Dutch artist living and working between Berlin and New York City. His artistic practice can beread as resistance to chrononormativity, to the linear structuring of time as it is linked to capitalist productivity and historical continuity. Joosten works with residual or fragmented materials: industrial prototypes, discarded architectural elements, forms that have become obsolete. These are materials that have fallen out of their temporal grid, not yet waste, no longer functional, but caught in a state of limbo. Instead of imposing a logic of progress or completion on these objects, Joosten emphasises incompleteness, delay and repetition.

This defies the values of clarity and linear narration and invites the viewer to dwell in temporal ambiguity. Joosten’s works suggest an ongoing becoming, a refusal to settle into past or future, memory or vision. The artist thus creates a space for a temporal drag - a reverberation of the past in the present. This form of temporal irritation can be read as both a material and conceptual interruption. What happens when time gets out of sync? When materials, memories and narratives lose their intended place in cultural, industrial or emotional systems? And instead take on alternative rhythms? Joosten collects the unclaimed, the half-forgotten, the speculatively remaining. We find ourselves in the archive of the not-yet.

- Emily Pretzsch

solo/duo-shows

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Last Updated 14.02.26

Jonathan Joosten

ISSUE (series)
Buck up - [...] We’ll get along !
ARCHIVED HERO (series)
RE:VISION (series)
CUT-FISHING FOR A VIEW
TRADING POSTmodernity
FOLGE #07 (PILOT)
DOMAIN NOIR
HC (stack-style)
1-ROOM APT.
UT (chamber)
STUFE 01 - STUFUNG 02

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selected work

ISSUE (series)

A magazine with an annual subscription. A payment and thus a promise for content that doesn't yet exist. The issues yet to be published are already assumed. Providing a contemporary overview. This current moment is changing, being overwritten. And requires replacement with new content. The magazine's graphic grid remains, and the cover template is merely replaced in terms of content. A new photo, a new name, the issue one step further. It's a production machine.

Once the preparatory work has been completed, this logic can continue to wander freely, settling within the tested form. I'm interested in what leads to the final version before what is visible, and how these prototypes and steps lose their function and become irrelevant at the moment of completion. They remain in storage, too valuable to be discarded, but they represent dead material. Retired, waiting in storage for a possible overview exhibition or publication in which they could be honored one last time as an important part of the development.

PUBLIC REEL

We organize our thoughts around places and categories, giving everything a name to construct the clarity we so deeply seek. Society emerged from the realization that collaboration could achieve far more than isolated effort. The concept of shared expertise was born: a system of interconnected tasks and sections, pieced together to shape our collective reality.

‘PUBLIC REEL’ asks for a beginning: how did we even end up here? A ball was dropped, and broke, wasn’t it supposed to bounce. The ceiling is pressing but therefore brings movement. What once seemed like a perfect, rounded idea has already been archived: paste over the old, preserve, honor and embrace the core.

ARCHIVED HEROseries

A toy representing a character, just an imprint shaped by play, a labelled character. They don’t want to leave, talking about their glorious times,in which they were once at the top. Icons in films, advertising, stories idealised, glorified and commercialised.

These figures, torn from history, have become myths unable to die due to their mass medialisation, part of our popular culture. But slowly they escape into the wall. They can no longer follow the contemporary, which is not their own, they fall out, become alienated and isolated and lose their once shining status as changing times and new values shift their context.

OPEN COUNTRY
(cherokee) XJ

They call it Open Country. Paved roads, dirt roads, no roads. A promise pressed into rubber and steel. The prairie stretches endlessly. A lone Cherokee on horseback. Freedom at the horizon. Already claimed, packaged, and sold, layered into tire ads, stitched into the leather seats of a Jeep. “It is… has been… and will forever be… a classic.”

Pulled out of history and suspended in popular culture, unable to die, yet unable to truly live. In this sense, Open Country is not just a terrain but an idea, a myth of endlessness, of a place where nothing is closed off. What does it mean to live inside a landscape that sells us back our desire to feel free, happy, and strong, “on the road where we belong,”?

They were legends, “not born, but made,” and now they hover on the edge of collapse.

RE:PLY (seperation)

A silent shift in urban space: Berlin still has gaps that emerged from the destruction of the 2. world war and were never built on again, many of which were used provisionally after the war and some of which have survived to this day.

A transformation that was not planned, but rather came about: from private living to public open space. They express of a certain absence and the result of economic and political decisions. A lack of investment, low land values and a planning focus on just certain districts meant that they remained undeveloped for decades. Today, in the context of increasing gentrificatio and speculation, even these incidental spaces are coming under pressure.

The work understands these places as urban archives in which history and everyday life intertwine. An element of such an area is renovated and transferred to the exhibition space, not as a replica, but as a displacement.

[NAUT]

in collaboration with
Daniel Hölzl

[NAUT.] presents a capsized Catamaran stranded within on-shore architecture and in the snares of technology playing out a cyclical fever dream of the drive/urge for progress. While the actual question of necessity is diluted, rituals of competition form a framework for self-justification. The skeleton of the former boat is a reminder that there indeed is a limit, but we only play with the idea of accepting this grounding fact in moments of actual failure. Thus, also touching on the legend of Icarus.

Great New Sun

Great New Sun reflects on how meaning, presence, and narrative circulate in contemporary life. Through fragments, residues, and mediated forms, it explores the shifting relationship between bodies, images, and material systems.

Positioned between physical matter and digital reproduction, the work considers how objects and identities are constructed, dispersed, and reassembled within economies of attention and exchange. What remains are provisional structures, traces of use, consumption, and memory that resist fixed interpretation.

Great New Sun proposes a space for reflecting on how content becomes material, how fragments accumulate significance, and how presence persists within systems shaped by visibility and circulation.

DORMAIN SAFEGUARD

underneath the
new SUBSCAPE

The term “subscape” originates from an essay by George Nelson about the largely overlooked world below the level of the chair seat or tabletop. Nelson a designer, theorist, publisher, and all-around impresario of American midcentury modern design was fascinated by the “manifold wonders” to be found in this “zone of nearly total invisibility.” His interest stemmed from what he described as the fantastic “shock that comes with seeing familiar objects from a strange point of view.”

ERASE / REWIND

Yes, I said it’s fine before
But I don’t think so no more
I said it’s fine before

David Hall once presented a burning television set before this same image resurfaced in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, accompanied by Pink Floyd’s drifting, psychedelic guitar riffs.

When The Cardigans sing about erasing and rewinding, they evoke the persistence of the past: a nostalgia embedded in the act of playback itself, where memory resurfaces not as a stable image but as something fragmented, delayed, or degraded. Documentation becomes a form of memory, and memory a process of continual reproduction and loss.