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?

His practice thus ties in with author Elizabeth Freeman’s call in Time Binds (2010) to inhabit time in alternative, resistant ways. Neither quite past nor already future: 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

selected
group-shows:

curated
shows / events:

Referrals

Tincidunt Nibh
Ultricies Vestibulum
Facilisis Ornare,
Porta Libero Universitas,
tincidunt.nibh@portolibero.edu.au
0431 070 713

Dictumst Gravida
Auctor Ligula / Founder
Aliquam Aliquam Congue, Felis
dictumst.gravida@gmail.com
0404 965 983

Rhoncus Mattis
Suspendisse Professor
Facilisis, Bibendum Ornare & Congue
0415 843 581
rhoncus.mattis@facilisis.edu

Sollicitudin Euismod
Founder
Pellentesque Grounds, Porta Libero
0422 221 072
sollicitudin@vestibulum.com

Egestas Convallis
Deputy Parturient Dictum
Duis & Ultricies Vestibulum
egestas.convallis@vestibulum.edu
0402 254 956

Press

‘Vestibulum Inceptos Gravida’, Ornare Review,
by Tincidunt Nisl
2024

‘Ullamcorper Faucibus (Congue) Euismod’, by Ligula Parturient, Bibendum Review Porta Libero
2023

Dictumst Tristique, Facilisis Magazine, Edition Two, Porta Libero
2021

Auctor Adipiscing Art Magazine, Porta Libero
2020

Sollicitudin Ornare Magazine,
Porta Libero
2020

Last Updated 24.10.31

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

about
e-mail
instagram

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.

ISSUE (series)

Jonathan Joosten ISSUE [0724] | Berlin | 2024

Jonathan joosten ISSUE [1024] | Berlin | 2024

Jonathan Joosten ISSUE [1024] | Berlin | 2024

Jonathan joosten ISSUE [0924] | Berlin | 2024

Jonathan Joosten ISSUE [0924] | Berlin | 2024

Buck up - never say die. We’ll get along !

GloguaAir | Berlin | 2025

In collaboration with Moksha Richards

Surrounded by paralysed witnesses with a clearly defined task. Charged with emotional value, part of our individual worlds.

Utilitarian forms made to serve. Decades in the same framework. Still functional, still standing. Cycles of consumption and industry. Memories of cracked shells, of stains and colour streaks from a previous pulped life. Recycled, reshaped, and marked by their pasts.

Demanded material accumulates presence, builds a character. The objects anthropomorphize into figures who have lived through repetition and rhythm. Carriers of evidence of what has passed through them, came, stayed, and left.

We were inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The Tramp, reduced to a functional part of the machine, mirrors these objects. Designed for use, bent to utility. And yet he resists. He clowns, he dances, he escapes. In these systems of enforced rhythms, he remains alive. The Tramp and his companion are the only joyful spirits in a world of automata. They live by their wits, their humour, their movement.

The final card of Modern Times reads: “Buck up - never say die. We’ll get along !” A trace remains. A future stirs.
[↑]

Jonathan Joosten
Buck up - never say die. We’ll get along !

Jonathan Joosten & Moksha Richards
Buck up - never say die. We’ll get along !