”When you work with history, you never know its complexities.”
We visited Tarik Kiswanson in his Berlin studio and found a man with four nationalities investigating questions of heritage and identity between borders.
”I think what goes through my work mostly is the question of the aftermath. What happens in the aftermath of things? What happens in the aftermath of trauma, of crisis, of exile, of migration?”
”What really interested me was the human condition. What links us on the most profound level as human beings? How can creation and art save us and help us survive and resist essentially? As an artist, you can resurrect something from the past, bring it into the present, and how that thing could essentially tell us something about ourselves that we don’t fully understand or that we’ve forgotten or that we want to forget.”
Tarik Kiswanson (b. 1986 in Halmstad, Sweden) is a visual artist and a poet. 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 addresses universal concerns and explores 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 such as refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, and polyphony through its own distinct language.
Kiswanson comes from a Palestinian family that was exiled from Jerusalem to Tripoli and later Amman, before finally settling in Halmstad, Sweden, where he was born. Kiswanson spent a decade in London, where he studied art, before relocating to Paris, where he has lived and worked since 2010. He received his MFA from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2014) and BFA from Central Saint Martins-University of the Arts London (2010). He holds four nationalities and speaks and writes in five languages.
Tarik Kiswanson was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2023 at Centre Pompidou. His work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions at institutions, most recently at Kunsthalle Portikus (2024), Oakville Galleries (2024), 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, Kunsthalle Münster, Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, The Ural Biennial, Performa Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, and MUDAM-Museum of Contemporary Art Luxembourg. Kiswanson serves as advisor on the scientific committee of the Edouard Glissant Art Fund.
Tarik Kiswanson was interviewed by Ole Stenum in his studio in July 2025.
Camera: Albert Valdemar Stenum
Edited by: Ole Stenum
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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