TARIK KISWANSON – The Relief
TARIK KISWANSON
The Relief
8 May – 30 August
Sfeir-Semler Gallery Hamburg
Exhibitions
hamburg
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In The Relief, Tarik Kiswanson continues to examine the repercussions and aftermath of war, trauma, and ruptures across historical events.
Opening on 8 May 2025, a date that marks the anniversary of the end of World War II, this solo exhibition centers on an extremely rare historical object: the “Steinway Victory Vertical,” or “G.I. Steinway”–an upright piano produced by Steinway & Sons in New York in 1942 and parachuted to U.S. and allied troops deployed across Europe to bring psychological relief through the traumatic events of the war. The piano is one of the earliest examples in history of recreational music making. The Steinway family, who originated from Seesen in Germany, kept deep ties to Hamburg, the only German city where the family maintained a factory after their emigration to New York in 1850.
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Commissioned during a time when civilian production had been halted and factories repurposed for the war effort, these instruments were uniquely engineered to be as lightweight as possible. Painted in olive drab camouflage, each piano was packed in a custom crate equipped with tools and tuning instructions—ready to be parachuted to where the soldiers were stationed. Of the 2,436 Victory Verticals produced during World War II, almost all were ultimately lost, damaged when landing or chopped for firewood.
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Kiswanson engages with this charged legacy through the careful restoration of one such unique piano. Removed from its original utilitarian function, it is installed in the gallery, detached from its protective casing. The instrument levitates above a child-size white cocoon, in a sculptural gesture that reimagines the wartime relic as a symbol of the historical rupture it embodies, echoing music’s transcendent and recreational potential.
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In dialogue with the installation, Tarik Kiswanson’s latest video work unfolds within the Conservatoire de Saint-Denis, situated in the northern suburbs of Paris. The conservatory was established in 1977 as a social project to offer music education to children and adults in the underprivileged and multicultural city. Over time, it has evolved into a comprehensive cultural institution, providing lessons in a wide range of musical disciplines. The film quietly observes the hands of three local children—aged 8, 10, and 11—as they grapple with the task of deciphering the score of the Anthem of Europe, commonly known as Ode to Joy, drawn from the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Through the children’s hands the partition is deconstructed, re-written and reimagined.
Filmed in an unbroken 360-degree pan, the camera’s continuous circular motion resists closure, creating a temporal loop without a clear beginning or end. Presented vertically, the work evokes a sense of suspended time. Through moments of hesitation, silence, and soft piano notes, Kiswanson captures a threshold space—where learning, uncertainty, and the emergence of understanding intersect. The film becomes a meditation on transmission, formation, and the delicate architecture of becoming.
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Together, the installation and film form a poetic constellation—one that meditates on fragility, resilience, and the intergenerational transmission of memory. Whether through the weight of a salvaged wartime piano or the tentative notes of a partition learned anew, Kiswanson invites us to listen closely to the interstitial, often overlooked moments that shape cultural identity and collective consciousness. In doing so, the exhibition becomes a space not only of reflection, but of regeneration—a site where the echoes of history resound in the acts of becoming and belonging.
IAN HAMILTON FINLAY
Fragments
8 May – 30 August
Sfeir-Semler Gallery Hamburg
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Sfeir-Semler started representing Ian Hamilton Finlay in 1991, holding five solo exhibitions in its spaces in Kiel then Hamburg over the last decades, as well as presenting the work at international art fairs, in group exhibitions, and in instutions worldwide. In Hamburg, his work is in the collections of the Hamburger Kunsthalle and a permanent installation is embedded in the ground in front of its Galerie der Gegenwart: a sentence in German that reads Heimat is not the land – it is the communion of feelings. An extensive show celebrated his oeuvre at the Deichtorhallen in 1995.