Artist, Joachim Koester, recalls the exhibition in the following anecdote:

"The first time I exhibited at Overgaden was in 1989, along with Lars Bent Petersen, Jes Brinch and Peter Bach Nicolaisen. Like many other artists at the time, we were fascinated by what was happening on the art scene in Cologne, where you could see exhibitions by Appropriation artists such as Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine. We went there several times a year, always starting at the Museum Ludwig, where we got a gallery guide. There wasn’t the same information flow in those days as there is today, so after we had seen everything there was to see in the galleries, we ended up by visiting the Walther König bookshop and browsing through the books and catalogues to see if there was anything new that caught our eye.

When the time came for our exhibition at Overgaden, what we wanted most of all was to make the place look like a Cologne gallery – i.e., a perfect white cube with neon lighting – which was the exact opposite of Overgaden, where daylight streamed in and there were patinated tiles on the floor. To make it look like a real gallery, we had the idea of building some walls, which we would subsequently sell to Overgaden, but the board weren’t interested in that. They felt that this would destroy the spaces, and asked us to rethink our plan. However, we did end up building one wall, so that the ground floor came to look almost like it does today. We were very meticulous: we covered all the nails and filled the holes many times – it was hard work, a real nightmare.

Like our exhibitions at Baghuset, the exhibition at Overgaden was above all intended to display a specific aesthetic, inspired by neo-Conceptual American art. Lars Bent had created some large stamp paintings, and Jes, who at the time was interested in a kind of Buddhist punk, showed a painting of a cartoon man opening his head, with the caption ‘Der er intet inden i mennesket, intet sind, ingen bevidsthed ’ (There is nothing inside the human being, no mind, no conscious- ness). I myself exhibited three paintings of political posters, among other things, and these may have been not completely thought through and a bit hesitant, but I remember it as being tremendously liberating to be able to dive into an ocean of existing images and re-mix stories and ideas like a DJ.

After having exhibited abroad for many years, I had a solo exhibition at Overgaden in 2008. By that time I had worked several times with barricading galleries by boarding up the windows, and at Overgaden I had the opportunity to do so on a larger scale. This was actually when I first began to work in a more installational way and think of the exhibition as more of a framework for the ideas and stories that wind their way through it. It was also the start of my collaboration with the poet Morten Søkilde. During the exhibition we held a horror evening, with performances and film screenings, and this was an interesting format, which gave me an opportunity to rethink the exhibition and present some of the ideas in new ways."