Ian Waelder – thereafter

Night Memory is right here

I once dreamed of keeping a daily diary. Convinced that only precise textual consistency would preserve time, and frustrated by my inability to archive my childhood, I would start over again and again. I remember feeling tremendously sad (at times mad) about not having the alleged discipline required to capture time. Playing with memory felt like a losing game after all. From that moment on, I started keeping a shoebox containing relics and heirlooms of time. It gave me the sense that the past was not gone, but quietly waiting to be remembered by unpacking tiny objects.

Years later, I have been following the footsteps of Spanish artist Ian Waelder across countries, moving along the threshold of his memorable and archival fragments. He reuses materials, sounds, symbols, found objects, and autobiographical elements. To re-encounter Waelder’s work is like stepping into a box of his life, tracing meaning through the ordinary.

I came to understand that the diary I had once longed for as a child would have been a trompe-l’œil of my memory: an illusion of capturing time and memory that, in reality, is nonstop fragmented and reconstructed. More so, words fail sometimes. Waelders’s practice has made me look into the crackholes of time, the overlooked, the remnants of memories that are often not considered worthy.

As I visit the Kestner Gesellschaft to see Waelder’s exhibition thereafter, the first encounter is from the outside: eight noses are attached to the facade of the building. The nose is crucial in the artist’s toolkit. It works as a link across generations, referencing a personal family story of his father, who speaks with joy of the “Waelder nose”. The installation Self-Portrait As My Father’s Nose (2025) in Hannover consists of eight papier-mâché casts taken from a clay sculpture formed from the fathers nose. Intended to be eaten by birds and insects, the noses are coated with a mixture of fat, seeds, and agar-agar, interrupting the rigid architecture of the building. I figure that the installation works as a tribute to the Hanover-born artist Dieter Roth, in particular to the work P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the Artist as Vogelfutterbüste) from 1969, a portrait bust cast from chocolate and birdseed, intended to be consumed by animals as well. This reference in time and person is one of the many tributes that run through the artist’s practice, and it forms the second collaborative element embedded in this work.

As I think of both works, I feel their deteriorating nature raises questions of portrait-painting, authorship, transformation, and absence. While Roth appears visually in his work, Ian is present in a different way: his autobiographical approach is marked by a deliberate visual absence of himself as a person, even as his work is grounded in everything he is: a sum of his family's history and the time before him, culminating in a nose which acts like a rather ironic self-portrait. Yet the subtle translation cannot be decoded immediately; it does not appear in the foreground but instead unfolds as a hidden narrative as one moves through the space, remaining concealed rather than being explicitly articulated.

Waelder transformed the Kestner Gesellschaft in a way that startled people. Using cardboard as his primary material for this show, he rebuilt the entire exhibition space into a narrow, labyrinthine passage with a bright big room at the end, changing the logic of the institution's rooms. As I adjust to the subtle resistance of the floor, I become acutely aware of my own body. And yet, as I move through it, all I leave behind is a fleeting trace in Waelder's work. I often visit exhibitions alone, as it allows for a more intimate encounter with the work. In Ian’s practice, the exhibition unfolds almost as a one-to-one situation, less oriented toward groups or larger audiences than toward an individual experience.

Upon entering the Kestner Gesellschaft, I hear a piano play that I have encountered in a few of Ian’s previous exhibitions—yet it resonates differently to me, familiar but subtly transformed. It drifts through the space, punctuated by pauses, as if the player was struggling to recall the tune. This sound piece lies in a recording of the artist's grandfather, Federico Waelder, at the piano. Waelder’s grandfather, a trained pianist, escaped Nazi Germany after being imprisoned in a concentration camp, and eventually fled to Chile in 1939. As Far As I Can Recall (Dad on Piano) (2025) presents one of his compositions, reinterpreted by Waelder’s father, who attempts to play it from memory.

The recording is so far the only existing trace of Federico Waelder's music, which found the artist rather by accident during the first lockdown in 2020 at his parents' house in Mallorca. Ever since, this melody has repeatedly found its way into the artist's practice in various forms: he played it on a radio in Frankfurt or whistled it for a show in Palma. This one piece of music gently traces back to his grandfather's life as a Musician, now serving as one element to connect to the past.

Moving forward, I encounter Sprain (38) (2023): an antique wooden last fused with a porcelain nose, echoing again his father’s, who once worked as a shoemaker alongside his artistic practice. Another nose, now rendered realistically, hides inside a cardboard-box titled Breather (2025). Turning to the next corridor, the foot-sculpture Bystander (Ankle/Thread/Right) (2025) hangs along the corridor. The work displays three casts of shoe interiors, intricately threaded with laces.

Walking toward the final room, the ceiling is layered with frosted glass, scattered with fragments of newspapers that barely allow the eye to read.These are paired with inkjet prints of children running and playing. On the cardboard-wall hangs a cutout from Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross (1435), depicting Mary Magdalene; above it, the word ‘Erbarmen’ appears. As I come close to observe the newspaper used in Mercy (Leak) (2025) I notice black tea leaves, butter, croissant crumbs, and oats—materials that would rarely, if ever, find their way into a literal box of memory, I think to myself. Yet here they form an unexpected and subtle archive, a constellation of the everyday and the sacred, suggesting alternative access to archival material, studying what quietly settles in the spaces between us while life is happening.

Playing with the logic of patina, such as adding food leftovers onto newspapers, Waelder, within the so-called framework of art history as we know it, turns conventional ways of seeing upside down. While in the case of old masters, for example, patina is often treated as a troubling by-product of time, he gently challenges this notion, allowing traces, residues, and the ephemeral marks of everyday life to exist as part of the work. In doing so, Waelder encourages viewers to reconsider the relationship between time, material, and memory, showing how impermanence and fragility can carry beauty and significance.

Walking upstairs, a triptych of canvases mounted in a row conceals as much as it reveals. Across the surfaces, a young boy seems to run—his motion caught in fleeting fragments. Background Vehicle (Running Scene) (2025) presents film stills in which an Opel Olympia used to appear in the background but was erased by the artist. This car became central to Waelder’s research: the very same model once belonged to his grandfather and was sold in 1939 to finance his escape from Nazi-Germany.

As I take the train back home, I think of the colour palette across the exhibitions I have seen by Waelder. This one included, it begins to act like a fading memory itself. Like time-worn photographs from a photo album that has endured for centuries, the colours opt for uncertainty. The beige of the cardboard, the grey of the papier-mâché, the white of the air-dry porcelain or the canvas all withhold rather than explicitly reveal. This restrained palette cultivates a careful, almost tender approach to memory: one that is unstable and slippery, hovering between presence and absence.

Waelder’s practice feels like a poem to me: meaning unfolds in the spaces between the lines. With only a handful of words, often absent a coherent narrative, it resists linear telling. And yet it is poetry, above all forms of text, that has moved me most deeply. In attempting to write this review within a few pages, I find myself drawn to offer a shortcut into his work by quoting lyric by Etel Adnan, which I have carried along in my box of memories ever since my best friend gifted it to me:

“Memory and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks and constantly merging. Both escape our will, though we depend on them. Measured but measured by whom or by what? The one is inside, the other, outside or so it seems, but is that true? Time seems also buried deep in us but where? Memory is right here, in the head, but it can exit, abandon that head, leave it behind, disappear. Memory, a sanctuary of infinite patience.”