Tarik Kiswanson

  • Tarik Kiswanson
  • Work

 

Tarik Kiswanson, 2023, Exhibition view, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City
Tarik Kiswanson, Nido, 2022, Exhibition view, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City

 

Tarik Kiswanson (b. 1986, Halmstad) is a visual artist and poet. He comes from a Palestinian family that was 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.

Tarik Kiswanson’s work encompasses sculpture, writing, performance, drawing, sound, and video works. For over a decade, he has explored notions of rootlessness, metamorphosis, and memory through his interdisciplinary practice. A legacy of displacement and transformation permeates his works and is indispensable to both their form and the modes of sensing they produce. While retaining an attachment to the intimate and personal, his work speaks to universal concerns and to social and collective histories of rupture, loss, and regeneration. Kiswanson’s oeuvre can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes like refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, and polyphony through their own distinct language.

Tarik Kiswanson was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2023. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions, most recently at Bonniers Konsthall (2023), Salzburger Kunstverein (2023), Museo Tamayo (2023), M HKA-Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (2022), Hallands Konstmuseum (2022) and Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain (2021). He has participated in group exhibitions and biennials at institutions such as Centre Pompidou, Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, 16th Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, The Ural Biennial, Performa 19 Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, and MUDAM-Museum of Contemporary Art Luxembourg.


Selected Solo Exhibitions

2024 Prelude, Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada 
2023 Afterwards, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria
Becoming, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden
Nido, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico
2022 Anamnesis, M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium
Nest, Hallands Konstmuseum, Halmstad, Sweden
Nest, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon
Manifesto of Fragility, 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France
2021 Mirrorbody, Carré d'Art - Museum of Contemporary Art, Nîmes, France
The Window, Murin-An Garden, Institut Français, Kyoto, Japan
2020 I, Atelier Calder, Calder Foundation, Saché, France
2019 AS DEEP AS I COULD REMEMBER, AS FAR AS I COULD SEE, PERFORMA Biennial 2019, New York, United States
Dust, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
2018 Haytham, Porcino, Berlin, Germany
Come Of Age, Fondation d'entreprise Ricard, Paris, France
AS DEEP AS I COULD REMEMBER, AS FAR AS I COULD SEE, Lafayette Anticipations, Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris, France
Birth, Petit Palais, Paris, France
2017 ALL THE THINGS MY EYES DON'T SEE, Musée Gallo-romain de Saint-Romain-en-Gal, Biennale de Lyon Résonance, Lyon, France
2016 Ongoing Reflection, Collège des Bernardins, Paris, France


Selected Group Exhibitions

2024 forms of the surrounding futures, Kunsthalle Münster, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
2023 Prix Marcel Duchamp, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
forms of the surrounding futures, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Göteborg, Sweden
READ, Kunsthalle Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
30 Ans de Carré d’Art, Carré d’Art - Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes, France
From the KADIST collection: Be here, or even better, be nowhere, Kadist Foundation, San Francisco, USA
yours truly, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany
2021 Living in This Exquisite Corpse, Ambassade de France, Bern, Switzerland
HI-STORYTELLING, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, Germany
In The Open, The Common Guild, Glasgow, United Kingdom
2020 De leur temps, Collection Yvon Lambert, Avignon, France
2019 Tainted Love, Centre d'art Villa Arson, Nice, France
Foncteur d'Oubli, Le Plateau, FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris, France
Immortality, Ural Biennial of Contemporary Art, Yekaterinburg, Russia
What remains is what the poets found, PS120, Berlin, Germany
2017 Flatlands II, MUDAM - Musée d’art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City, Lxembourg
Old Dream, Mains d’oeuvres, Paris, France
Modern Sculpture, Galeria Casado Santapau, Madrid, Spain
2016 Flatlands I, MRAC - Musée Régional d’Art Contemporain, Sérignan, France
De Leur Temps, IAC - Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne/ Monograph Rhône-Alpes, France
Équilibre Instable, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Libourne, France
Le Cabaret Au Salon, Beffroi Montrouge, Montrouge, France
2015 Les Mains Libres, Espace 251 Nord, Liège, Belgium
Les Voyageurs, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France
L'Ange de l'Histoire, Archivement, Belvédère, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France


Monographs and Solo Exhibition Catalogues

2023 Becoming
Bonniers Konsthall
2022 Nest
Hallands Konstmuseum, Mousse Publishing
Texts by Magnus Jensner and Sara Arrhenius
2021 Mirrorbody
Carré d'Art-Musée d'Art Contemporain, DISTANZ
Texts by Jean Marc Prévost, Annie Godfrey Larmon, Xiaoyu Weng, Ingrid Luquet-Gad


Poetry Books

2022 The Window
Collections of Poems by Tarik Kiswanson
MHKA - Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, JBE Book, Paris
2018 AS DEEP AS I COULD REMEMBER, AS FAR AS I COULD SEE
Collection of Poems by Tarik Kiswanson
Lafayette Anticipations, JBE Books


Artist Residencies

2024 Villa Albertine, United States
2020 Atelier Calder, Calder Foundation, Saché, France
2018 Denniston Hill, Monticello, New York, United States
2016 ISCP - International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, United States
2015 Sèvres - Cité de la céramique, Sèvres, France
La Générale, Paris, France
2014 Triangle, Friche la Belle de mai, Marseille, France