Tarik Kiswanson: The Relief – War Memory, Music, and the Fragility of Transmission

The Relief by Tarik Kiswanson at Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, May 8 – August 30, 2025.

There is a moment, even before stepping through the threshold, when the mind fills with a silence that is not the absence of sound, but a dense anticipation, almost a vibration. The light of Hamburg, filtered between the buildings of Admiralitätsstraße, seems to lean forward, as if peering inside. You think of the title: The Relief. Solace, a truce, the breath taken after a long run. But here, the run is no ordinary one. Here, the shortness of breath comes from far away—from fields scarred by a war that ended, on this very date, exactly eighty years ago. One can’t help but wonder: can an object carry an echo of comfort across time? Can a piano, parachuted among debris and bodies, return a fragment of humanity to those who find it?

The entrance to Tarik Kiswanson’s exhibition offers no immediate answers. Instead, it presents a suspended landscape, where every element seems to exist in service of memory. The air is carefully calibrated: there is no full light, only a protective half-shadow, like a hand raised to shield the eyes from glare. No background noise intrudes; if there is any, it is minimal, leaving space for an inner listening.

The first sight is almost unreal: a “Steinway Victory Vertical”,  the legendary “G.I. Steinway”,  restored yet stripped of its original role. Suspended, literally, above a white, child-sized cocoon. Born in 1942 to be shipped to the front, it now floats as if holding its breath, its wood darkened by age, its strings mute. Its history, built light, painted in olive drab, packed with tools and instructions for tuning under shellfire, presses into the mind as you look, yet its present is something else: no longer a diversion for soldiers far from home, but a fragile monument to what remains of an act of care amid destruction.

The cocoon beneath is a silent yet eloquent presence. It evokes protection and metamorphosis, suggesting that memory, to regenerate, must pass through a new state. It is hard not to see here a metaphor for transmission: the object of the past, hovering above a potential cradle of the future.

From the main gallery, a passage leads to the second work: a video shot at the Conservatoire de Saint-Denis, in the multicultural outskirts of Paris. The vertically mounted screen forces an unusual focus. The camera performs a steady, circular rotation around three children trying to decipher the Ode to Joy. There are no rapid cuts, no score designed to “move” the viewer on cue—only the small, hesitant hands searching for the right note, pausing, trying again. The visual circle, without beginning or end, transforms the act of practice into a kind of slow ritual, where time is measured not by the clock but by the uncertain progression of learning.

Here, Kiswanson works with time as a material. In the piano sculpture, he suspends it in space, lifting it out of ordinary flow. In the video, he wraps it in a continuous loop, where the attempt itself matters more than the outcome. In both cases, the artist seems to ask: what truly endures of a legacy? Is it the sound itself that travels through generations, or rather the act of trying, of placing fingers on keys, of passing along a rhythm, even if imperfect?

The gallery as a whole becomes a constellation of two poles: on one side, the weight of history; on the other, the lightness, or the uncertainty, of the future. Moving from one work to the other is a passage from matter to gesture, from object memory to living memory. There is no overt sentimentality, yet a deep attentiveness to fragility emerges: wood that could crack, a note that could falter, a child who could decide to stop trying.

Leaving, one image remains crystalline: a piano that does not touch the ground, and beneath it, a white shell waiting. Perhaps the true relief is not in the music played, but in the space left for the possibility that someone, one day, will pick up that interrupted melody. Like a held breath that finally finds air to escape.