PRESENTATION: Tarik Kiswanson-Prelude
Tarik Kiswanson is a visual artist and poet. He comes from a Palestinian family that exiled from Jerusalem to North Africa and then Jordan before subsequently settling in Sweden in the early 1980s where he was born. Kiswanson spent ten years in London where he studied art before relocating to Paris where he has lived and worked since 2010. He holds four nationalities and speaks and writes in five languages.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Oakville Galleries Archive
Tarik Kiswanson has won the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2023. Kiswanson was born in Sweden in 1986 and lives and works in Paris. His work, across multiple mediums including sculpture, writing, drawing, performance and video, explores themes such as rootlessness, regeneration, and renewal, operating at the intersection of different cultural contexts. ‘As a second-generation immigrant, my story is shaped by displacement and uprooting,’ Kiswanson has said in interviews. Always operating at the intersection of different cultural contexts, his various abstract works examine subjects related to memory, heritage, birth, loss, and belonging. His oeuvre can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes such as refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, hybridity, and polyphony through their own distinct language. A legacy of displacement and transformation permeates his works. The artist’s Palestinian family fled Jerusalem to eventually settle in Sweden, where he was born. Over the years, Kiswanson’s artistic inquiry has simultaneously investigated personal and universal concerns relative to the human condition and to social and collective histories of rupture, loss, and regeneration. Tarik Kiswanson presents a selection of artworks produced over the last few years. This exhibition consists of sculptural work, a short film, and drawings. “Prelude” is the first part of a longer-running, multi-year project produced in collaboration with Executive Director Séamus Kealy and the team of Oakville Galleries. In “The Reading Room” (2020), a six-year-old sounds out passages from a selection of books by cultural theorists and philosophers. He transforms reflections on diaspora, displacement, and postcolonial identities into a soundscape of murmurs, whispers, and hums. The film was shot at Columbia University’s “The Edward W. Said Reading Room” in New York, which houses the personal library of the late Palestinian American intellectual and theorist, who taught comparative literature at the university for over three decades. Kiswanson’s deliberately blurry footage and the faltering sounds of a young boy learning to read seem to slow time, creating an interstitial zone between sound and sense, knowledge, and experience. In “Recall” (2020-2023), Kiswanson encases significant personal elements in blocks of resin, as if suspending them in time and space. The things they each contain are at once general and hyper-specific: a candle, a pen, a drop of blood, and, in the case of “Anamnesis” (2023), a floorplan. In this sculpture, whose title refers to the act of recalling moments from a previous existence, a small metal floorplan seems to hover weightlessly. Kiswanson created the object in conversation with his three sisters, who worked together to mentally reconstruct their childhood apartment in a social housing complex in southwest Sweden, which had been torn down in the early 2000s. Visible only as a hazy apparition beneath layers of resin, “Anamnesis” speaks to fleeting, deeply concealed aspects of memory.
Photo left & right: Tarik Kiswanson, © Tarik Kiswanson, Courtesy the artist, carlier|gebauer Gallery & Oakville Galleries
Info: Oakville Galleries, 1306 Lakeshore Road East, Oakville, ON, Canada, Duration: 3/2-1/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00, www.oakvillegalleries.com/
