“Sometimes life is like aimless wandering in a maze.
Walls are all around. Roughly built, dilapidated walls.
And buzz. Persistent heap of sounds coming from the walls.
Somewhere down there life goes by. I can hear it. Sometimes one manages to tune in to it, getting something meaningful out of it. Someone’s talking. Perhaps this is my friend. Or maybe I do not know the one. Sometimes, you happen to come across a breach in the wall. One can take a peek through it. Small fragments of life passing by without me in them. But I feel their importance.
Possibly, someone got here before me, scratched this hole in a hope to see through or find someone to tell something to. Or that one did it for me. Now it does not matter. What is important is that I’m here. I can hear. I can look.”
Ivan Kadaner
“Listening to the walls”, an artistic project of Ivan Kadaner, is an attempt to build a dialogue between a man and man’s self in dense informational space. The artist designs a multi-dimensional field in which the viewer perceives the reality: a large-scale installation in a form of plywood wall pattern makes not only eyesight come alive, but also sense of touch of the viewer who has to constantly overcome obstacles of the maze, meeting on the way many implicit and explicit images consisting fifty-fifty of reality and fiction. In parallel, the viewer is led by a multi-channel sound installation that snatches out of the ambiance snippets of odd messages that the mind of the viewer can arrange into a coherent text, which, when run through the prism of the viewer’s experience, becomes meaningful for the viewer alone.
Making sensory organs come alive one after the other, the artist goes further, ultimately appealing to the sense of time in the video “Loop goes here, needle coming trough”. The film offers the study, done by Ivan Kadaner, that is not just about casual observer’s experience, who accidentally finds himself in the midst of Russian province, where time does not seem to exist; but an attempt to outline the relationship between the past that one has not been through with and the incomplete present; the relationship, which, like spokes-woven fabric, eventually forms pattern of a unique individual being.