With kind permission of Carré d’Art – Museum of Contemporary Art, Nîmes/Photo Vinciane Lebrun
One of Tarik Kiswansonthe latest sculptures of Nest (2022), is an ovoid shape in fiberglass resin, larger than a human, its shape reminiscent of eggs and cocoons, but also seeds; Kiswanson notes that the Greek roots of the word “diaspora” come from the propagation of seeds. Especially as a polyglot – he speaks Swedish, Arabic, English, French and Italian – the artist likes to have, as he puts it, “something so dense or so layered that it produces things outside of your body and of your limits.”
Kiswanson was born in Halmstad, Sweden in 1986 to Palestinian parents. When his father arrived from Jerusalem in 1979, he was one of the few Arabs in the city, and the Swedish administration naturalized their original name, Al Kiswani, into the chimerical Kiswanson. He grew up not in the upscale parts of the city where wealthy Swedes have summer homes, but in residential complexes alongside other second-generation immigrants from countries such as the former Yugoslavia, Vietnam and Iraq. Kiswanson, based in Paris, finds it annoying that people assume he is a refugee because of his Palestinian heritage, because the exile took place before he was born. He said he “moves between these areas of cultures, identities, languages and the enormous anxiety I feel when I don’t fit into the black and white of society.”
Kiswanson’s early work focused on his family, “figuring out who I was, where I came from,” he said. “To understand, I don’t really come from nowhere.” An example, Grandfather’s Cabinet (2014), is a skeletal reconstruction of his grandfather’s filing cabinet, which his family took with them when they fled Jerusalem. Kiswanson recreated the shape using strips of brass, between which he poured molten silver from family heirlooms (like a spoon and a necklace) to seal the strips together. “My whole family history is stitched together at the seams,” he said.
Tarik Kiswanson: The fall2020.
Courtesy of Carré d’Art – Museum of Contemporary Art
Later, he began to focus on the experiences of his fellow second-generation immigrants, collaborating with preteen youth whose parents had also emigrated. In the movie The fall (2020), a boy named Mehdi, born in Belgium to Moroccan parents, plays with a pencil until it falls, then tilts his chair until it too falls to the ground. The entire sequence was shot on a Phantom camera, capable of recording thousands of frames per second, and is slowed down throughout to keep Mehdi suspended in a state of instability; it cuts and loops again just before Mehdi’s head hits the ground, so he doesn’t have time to be afraid, even though he knew before filming that it would hurt. This in-between state, which Kiswanson calls “the floating state of existing, detached and removed from one’s own heritage, one’s culture, one’s country, one’s family,” is where he likes to work. This is partly why he has turned more recently to abstraction, because it is not specific to any culture or era.
It’s a busy year for the artist. Solo exhibitions opened at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in April. Another will open at the Salzburger Kunstverein in Austria in July, as will a group exhibition at the Center Pompidou in Paris next fall, featuring Kiswanson as a finalist for the Marcel Duchamp Prize. Although he enjoys his success, he feels it was hard-earned, after years of waiting for the art world to catch up with the blurred way he presents identity in his art.
