A Magician of Simple Things: Ian Waelder at Kestner Gesellschaft
With a few humble gestures, Ian (Millennial, Spanish) stopped me in my hasty rut to remember the wonder that art can spark.
Paid subscribers may access a personal voice-over of this review here.
As I put on shoe covers and stepped into the room, I pierced through the intense scent of cardboard. Ian made the entire architecture out of cardboard. Floor and walls. There was darkness at first. I leaned into the premise that I was not entering another exhibition room but a world of its own. I was lucky to be by myself with no other people in sight. I walked through the narrow, beige corridor quietly, almost tiptoeing. I was holding my breath as if I wasn’t meant to be there.
I heard piano tinkling. Loud, at first, as if right around the corner. Then as an echo somewhere barely in the distance. It wasn’t a melody. It was more like somebody walked past a piano, looked around to make sure nobody was there, and shyly hit a few unrelated keys. Maybe they tried playing a tune they once heard but couldn’t fully recall. Just a few notes until they got busted and quickly snatched their hands away.
With the first step inside, Ian cast a spell on me. First, he shrank me. The translucently covered, warmly lit window in the upper corner of that corridor became unreachable to me. A Plato’s Cave reference? You know, that story where humans lived in a cave and knew no world outside but the shadows the priests cast onto the wall? Might be that reference. But not in a pretentious way. If it is, it’s not so much about the intellectual quote as it is about replicating that sense of magic. The wonder Plato’s fictional cave people experienced when flickering light birthed shaped darkness.
Then, Ian cast another spell and turned me into a cat. And I’m not even a cat person. Suddenly, I wanted to catch that light above with my paws. I wanted to stretch and scratch the cardboard walls with my claws. My ears sharpened every time I heard the piano tinkling. Ngl, I fought off intrusive thoughts that suggested I walk on all fours. Ian arranged shoe stretchers along the wall. The toe part stuck out the wall, making the stretchers look like duck beaks. A shoelace went through each one. I held myself back from playing with those strings.
And the third spell Ian cast turned me into a child. Not in a belittling or patronizing way. He made me look around with childlike wonder. As I turned around the first corner [mind you, all those transformations happened in a matter of like 30 seconds and 5 steps], I saw Sprain (38) (2023), another wooden shoe stretcher. This one was covered with patches of modeling clay and stuck vertically to the wall. Ian sculpted a white nose onto the heel. The idea of him working as a Geppetto building a Pinocchio made me giggle.
I took another turn. The corridor expanded into a room. The cardboard panels looked like a parody of the white isolation rooms in mental asylums you see in the movies. But this one wasn’t intimidating. This room was relieving isolation. The cardboard soaked up all the sounds. I resisted the urge to sit down in a corner and stop breathing for a while, just to hear perfect, humming silence. A glass box in a corner kept a dust layer on its surface. My thoughts quickly jumped to Hans Haacke (Silent Generation, German), only to jump right back to where they were before. Isn’t dust the image of silence? Accumulating through the absence of movement and change? Finger traces interrupted the even dust layer. Just like the piano kept breaking the silence. I thought of all the things I used to build with cardboard as a child—entire mansions, buses and cars and fortresses. The tinkling tore me out of my daydreaming again.
The milky ceiling seemed eternities away from me. I was a cat in a cozy cardboard box or a toddler crawling underneath the dining table. I looked up to see newspapers and photographs arranged behind the glass. I couldn’t read the headlines. Might have been yet just another sign that I finally needed to wear glasses on the regular.
The walls of that architectural core were empty except for two pieces. One of them was Mercy (Leak) (2025), a newspaper confined behind a layer of glass. Ian chose to crop the article so that the image pushes the accompanying words out. It’s the photograph of a painting. A close-up of a not exactly identifiable crying face. Perhaps late Middle Ages or Early Renaissance. Maybe a saint. The headline is slightly cropped as well: Erbarmen. Mercy.
I thought of how Sebastian Riemer (Millennial, German) taught me to see images: A picture is the picture of a picture of a picture… I didn’t see that figure cropped out of a painting and inserted into that newspaper article. I saw a trapped being. Trapped in one single emotion. Trapped in paint cracked open by time. Trapped in residue and dust. Trapped in a photograph. Trapped in a newspaper among letters and paragraphs. And now trapped behind glass in this space. The paper, it seems, turned into a prison window out of which this figure gazed with tearing eyes. And I wondered if they’d ever be released. At least from the pain they’re frozen in.
I was heading back towards the exit when three people stomped in. Their chatting scared the magic away into the corners and shadows, and I doubted that it would be willing to reveal itself once more. Back outside, I was myself again. But I felt like Ian forgot to fully reverse the spell — I silently kept slouching for a while, waiting for that shy piano tune to set in.
Ian Waelder: thereafter, on view from August 16 to November 16, 2025, at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover.
Kestner Gesellschaft
Goseriede 11
30159 Hannover
Website
Instagram: @kestner_gesellschaft @ianwaelder
See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic
This took me places! Thank you 🙏
Danke für den schönen Bericht!