thereafter
Kestner Gesellschaft
Hannover, DE
15.08 – 16.11.2025
Curator: Alexander Wilmschen
Assistant curator: Emilia Radmacher
Student assistance: Janne Lampe
With the support of:
carlier | gebauer (Berlin/Madrid)
diez (Amsterdam)
Acción Cultural Española
Curator: Alexander Wilmschen
Assistant curator: Emilia Radmacher
Student assistance: Janne Lampe
With the support of:
carlier | gebauer (Berlin/Madrid)
diez (Amsterdam)
Acción Cultural Española
Photos by © Volker Crone and John Forest
Text:
In thereafter, Ian Waelder connects the façade, atrium, and arcade hall of the Kestner Gesellschaft for the first time to form a spatial narrative between inside and outside, past and present. His works begin at the edges of the rememberable: familial traces, biographical fractures, everyday remnants – not as evidence, but as fragile carriers of a story that resists linear narration.
At the center of Waelder’s solo exhibition stands a labyrinthine structure made of cardboard, evoking the image of a packed moving box. The offset entrance of the arcaded hall diverts the gaze away from clear paths. Inside, sculptures, newspaper collages, a piano melody, and the materiality of cardboard and light condense into a dense assemblage—including a newspaper article covered with oats and traces of butter with the headline “Erbarmen” (“Mercy”), a deformed shoe last with a porcelain-like nose titled Sprain (38) (2023), and molded components from the Bystander (2025) series with dangling shoelaces. These are traces of domestic routines that elude concrete memory and yet evoke a strangely familiar atmosphere.
A brief piano melody sounds at irregular intervals, preceded by the splash of falling water. This acoustic gesture traces a personal thread: memories of childhood melodies and his grandfather’s music accompany Waelder in his current residency at the Laurenz-Haus Foundation in Basel, where he came across a piano by chance and recorded a fragmentary piece. The artist, grandfather, fled to Chile in 1939, weaves acoustic and material fragments into a poetics of remembrance in which the incomplete takes shape.
On the façade, Self-portraits as my father’s nose (2025) – proportionally enlarged nose sculptures made of seeds, in collaboration with his father, wait to be eaten by pigeons and other birds – their outlines might remain visible as traces. In the Café Tender Buttons, a triptych of raw linen works shows a running boy who seems to be moving forward out of the pictorial space as if in a filmic rewind– a quiet gesture of remembrance, a cinematic leap back into the past. Waelder’s use of materials and his works resist clear legibility and temporality. They conceive of memory not as reconstruction, but as a tentative movement along gaps, shifts, and sedimented surfaces where absence is most powerfully present.
At the center of Waelder’s solo exhibition stands a labyrinthine structure made of cardboard, evoking the image of a packed moving box. The offset entrance of the arcaded hall diverts the gaze away from clear paths. Inside, sculptures, newspaper collages, a piano melody, and the materiality of cardboard and light condense into a dense assemblage—including a newspaper article covered with oats and traces of butter with the headline “Erbarmen” (“Mercy”), a deformed shoe last with a porcelain-like nose titled Sprain (38) (2023), and molded components from the Bystander (2025) series with dangling shoelaces. These are traces of domestic routines that elude concrete memory and yet evoke a strangely familiar atmosphere.
A brief piano melody sounds at irregular intervals, preceded by the splash of falling water. This acoustic gesture traces a personal thread: memories of childhood melodies and his grandfather’s music accompany Waelder in his current residency at the Laurenz-Haus Foundation in Basel, where he came across a piano by chance and recorded a fragmentary piece. The artist, grandfather, fled to Chile in 1939, weaves acoustic and material fragments into a poetics of remembrance in which the incomplete takes shape.
On the façade, Self-portraits as my father’s nose (2025) – proportionally enlarged nose sculptures made of seeds, in collaboration with his father, wait to be eaten by pigeons and other birds – their outlines might remain visible as traces. In the Café Tender Buttons, a triptych of raw linen works shows a running boy who seems to be moving forward out of the pictorial space as if in a filmic rewind– a quiet gesture of remembrance, a cinematic leap back into the past. Waelder’s use of materials and his works resist clear legibility and temporality. They conceive of memory not as reconstruction, but as a tentative movement along gaps, shifts, and sedimented surfaces where absence is most powerfully present.
Exhibition views :
Recording of Juan Waelder, the artist's father, playing from memory the only existing trace of his own father's piano music. Stereo soundtrack playing from hidden ceiling loudspeakers. 1h50min in loop.
List of works