Buck up - never say die. We'll get along ! — jonathan joosten - artist

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

selected
group-shows:

curated
shows / events:

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

about
e-mail
instagram

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 !