Logo Goethe-Institut

USA New York

ERASE / REWIND

Exhibition|Featuring artist Jonathan Joosten

  • Goethe-Institut New York, New York, NY

  • Free

EXHIBITION OPENING:
May 14, 6:00-8:30pm

GALLERY HOURS:
Monday - Thursday, 10am-6pm


The Goethe-Institut New York presents ERASE / REWIND, the first US solo exhibition by artist Jonathan Joosten. Featuring newly commissioned, site-responsive works, the exhibition explores how reality, value, and meaning are constructed through framing, repetition, and symbolic attribution. Working at the intersection of cinematic simulation and consumer display, Joosten examines how film, architecture, and exhibition formats shape perception, creating presence while simultaneously obscuring absence. Referencing the two films The Thirteenth Floor (dir. Josef Rusnak, 1999) and Welt am Draht (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973), as well as Kim Jones’s Dior Autumn/Winter 2025 runway show, the project reflects on simulated realities and the instability of what appears immediate and real. Developed between New York and Berlin, the exhibition draws on urban observations such as empty yet illuminated storefronts and the missing “13th” floor in American elevators, subtle signs of absence within systems of visibility. ERASE / REWIND brings these observations together, examining urban space and media as sites where presence is continuously staged and absence persistently operates. 


Curated by Emily Pretzsch.
Special thanks to Zachary B. Feldman for his guidance and support in every aspect.
Many thanks to Léonard Berthou, Hiiona Choi, Jakob Hübner, Felix Murphy, and Moksha Richards for their expertise and conversations.
Graphic design by Anton Krude & Jonathan Joosten 

This exhibition is made possible with the support of CABIN NY, led by Lawrence Hazen, where Joosten is a spring 2026 artist-in-residence. 

Artist

Jonathan Joosten

Jonathan Joosten is a German-Dutch artist living and working between Berlin and New York City. His artistic practice can be read as resistance to chrononormativity, to the linear structuring of time 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, the artist emphasizes incompleteness, delay, and repetition. Joosten’s works suggest an ongoing becoming, a refusal to settle into past or future, memory, or vision. He thus creates a space for a temporal drag—a reverberation of the past in the present. Joosten collects the unclaimed, the half-forgotten, the speculatively remaining. We find ourselves in the archive of the not-yet. 

Related links