PRESENTATION: Tarik Kiswanson-Afterwards

Born in Halmstad, Sweden in 1986 where his family exiled from Palestine, Tarik Kiswanson’s artistic practice evinces an engagement with the poetics of métissage: a means of writing and surviving between multiple conditions and contexts. His various bodies of work can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes like refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, hybridity, and polyphony through their own distinct language.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo:Salzburger Kunstverein

Tarik Kiswanson’s work encompasses sculpture, writing, performance, drawing, sound and video works. His fundamental question is ontological: it is inscribed in philosophical research into Being as being. Notions of rootlessness, regeneration, and renewal are recurring themes in his oeuvre. Tarik Kiswanson presents “Afterwards”, a multi-form installation of new work in the Great Hall of Salzburger Kunstverein. Forms of rootlessness, regeneration and renewal are combined in this project through poetic sculptural and architectural gestures, where we see post-war histories eliding with contemporaneous experience. Kiswanson’s practice has been described as evincing a poetics of métissage: a means of writing and surviving between multiple conditions and contexts. His broad artistic practice acts as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes like refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, hybridity, and polyphony through their own distinct language. Tarik Kiswanson is a 2023 Nominee for the Marcel Duchamp Prize. The “Cradle: (2023), in contrast to the semi-obscured presence of the first cocoon, seems to rise freely; it dominates the airy space and pins a crib to the ceiling. Like “Homeland”, this floating mode of transport echoes the hopes and fears associated with the future. The source of “The Cradle” —a small color photograph that inhabits a nearby alcove, also forms its second part, revealing Kiswanson’s expectant mother leaning against his original crib. Three additional cocoons—all titled “Nest” (2020–21)—manifest a cryptic symbiosis, with their skins matching the color and texture of the walls. Placed at various heights in different parts of the room, they form a counterpoint to the “Recall” sculptures, which reside on the floor. Juxtaposing incubators and archive, this dichotomy situates viewers between the future and chapters drawn from the artist’s past. A similar sense of intermediacy is produced by “Robe” (2016), a large and highly polished stainless-steel panel with cut and bent elements that mirrors the architecture and everything else in the space. Making viewers aware of two realities—the actual one and a fragmented, alternate version—the reflectivity also acts as a foil to thwart understanding of the panel’s physical structure.

Photo: Tarik Kiswanson – Passing, 2019 – Courtesy the artist and carlier I gebauer and Kadist Foundation, Photo: Trevor Good

Info: Salzburger Kunstverein, Hellbrunner Straße 3, Salzburg, Austria, Duration: 19/7-10/9/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-19:00, www.salzburger-kunstverein.at/