Artists

Ian Kiaer

Press release

“Whatever a library desires, it cannot attain. Whether vast or small, royal or provincial, ancient or modern, it will never reach the immensity that sustains it; whatever it contains will never possess the self-evidence of a single hair, a pebble, a washbasin. It will never be like that famous and legendary map that coincides with the territory at every point because it is the territory itself.” Jean-Christophe Bailly, Une nuit à la bibliothèque [A Night at the Library], Christian Bourgois, 2005 IA: Working with Ian Kiaer always involves a moment of mental projection towards what the exhibition will become. From our very first conversations with the artist in 2011, we discussed the fragmentary form which, some fifteen years later, still strikes me as the most pertinent way of thinking about art and its language. It is impossible to reconstruct a narrative from Ian Kiaer’s installation and painting practice: the artist seeks instead to bring together traces and clues that viewers physically experience within a form of organised, relative opacity. The models placed on the floor create a focal point from which we can consider our own position within the exhibition space by placing it in a mise en abyme: perhaps we too are figurines in the gallery, itself transformed into a model, situated in a place whose dimensions we are not yet able to gauge. Thinking simultaneously about the Casa Biblioteca, its Brazilian patron, its location, and Ian Kiaer’s artistic practice brings to mind scenes from Maldoror, Julien Gosselin’s production recently staged by the Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe for the Cour d’honneur of the Palais des Papes in Avignon. An adaptation of texts by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and an epic reflection on the relationships between fiction, literature and politics, performed in Portuguese, Spanish, German and French, the production takes the form of an open, dispersed structure whose arrangement leaves an underlying question unresolved: what is the political responsibility of artists? In the exhibition, among the signs assembled by Ian Kiaer, the crimes of fascist regimes and their relationship to the forms of architectural and artistic modernity are evoked as a backdrop. Without presuming to predict the future, we can easily imagine that the relationship between art and ethics will become increasingly central to our thoughts and discussions. CB: In Ian Kiaer’s exhibition "library house", the Casa Biblioteca in Brazil extends, in my view, the experience of the Maison Louis Carré, where the artist was invited to exhibit through our initiative in 2024. In both cases, architecture does more than provide shelter for a potential domestic life: it constructs and sustains the conditions for a relationship between thought, landscape, spatial experience and inner experience. Whereas Alvar Aalto makes the sloping landscape itself the material of the Maison Louis Carré, the Casa Biblioteca, in turn, welcomes the forest—as wall, screen and painting—through an abstract structure: three platforms, a slab, a few posts, glass and water. This economy of means resonates with Ian Kiaer’s practice, in which models, architecture and painting can serve as “models of thought for dwelling.” The Casa Biblioteca is itself a way of dwelling: it brings work, reading and retreat together within a single space. Designed for a philosopher, it makes thought not merely a use to which the place is put, but one of its architectural conditions. In this way, it also connects, from a different perspective, with the figure of the artist’s studio: a place of withdrawal, not in order to cut oneself off from the world, but to sustain a particular relationship with it. In Une nuit à la bibliothèque [A Night at the Library], Jean-Christophe Bailly describes a space in which books bring distant times, voices and places into relation with one another. The library thus becomes less a place that contains the world than one that allows the world to emerge through its distances and correspondences. This openness was also perceptible in Wolfgang Tillmans’s exhibition, presented in 2025 in the library of the Centre Pompidou. There, the library was transformed into a space of experience, traversed by images, videos, spoken words and shared gestures, capable of welcoming what lies beyond it, and perhaps even what has not yet found its place in a book. In the Casa Biblioteca, this relationship between the book and the world takes physical form. The glass opens the books onto the forest, while the forest, in turn, seems to enter the reading space. The landscape and the library share the same subtropical sky. Perhaps it is here that the most tenuous connection with Ian Kiaer’s "library house" project takes shape: in an approach to architecture not as a closed form, but as an apparatus that holds together, without resolving them, a thought, a landscape, objects, light and colour. A way of thinking that stays as close as possible to what is being looked at. Born in 1971, Ian Kiaer lives in Oxford (UK). He makes fragile installations involving groupings of architectural models, untouched or slightly modified found objects, and two dimensional work to create fragmented narratives. Ian has exhibited internationally since 2000, with solo exhibitions at institutions including Heidelberger Kunstverein (2020), Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (2017), Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2011) and the Tate Britain, London (2003). He has also exhibited at the Venice Biennale (50th), Istanbul Biennale (10th), Berlin Biennale (4th), Lyon Bienniale (10th) and Manifesta 3. Several works are part of prestigious public collections including Tate London; FRAC Ile de France, Paris; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, US. Warmest thanks to: Clotilde Beautru, Sarah Cotelle, Chloé Gourmanel, Dave Hoyland, Esteban Neveu, François Orphelin, Chloé Poulain.