Born 1986 in Halmstad, Sweden
Lives and works in Paris, France
Through a complex and multidimensional body of work, Tarik Kiswanson explores notions of memory, trauma and regeneration. His practice examines how historical ruptures shape our present and shed light on the complexities of the human condition. He creates spaces where the intimate and the collective converge, inviting reflection on transmission, loss and resilience. At once intimate and personal, his oeuvre addresses universal concerns as well as world-historical histories of trauma and reconstruction. Kiswanson’s works can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring themes of war, migration, and, above all, their aftermath.
On the occasion of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, the artist expanded beyond present-day diasporic histories to post-war France and the mobilier pour sinistrés (emergency supply furniture) designed by French architect René Gabriel in 1945 specifically for war victims. Comprised of two chairs, a table, drawers, bed and a wardrobe, Gabriel’s essential objects for homebuilding were created and rationed to restore dignity and humanity. In Kiswanson’s work, the wardrobe is levitating mid-air, evoking what he calls ‘the accidents of history’ – uncontrollable, violent events that shape social becoming. Since then, he has extended this research to other reconstruction furniture produced across Europe, South America and the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. His project The Relief (Steinway Victory Vertical, 1944) furthered his interest into the relationship between trauma and music. The project focused on a specific type of piano, parachuted across Europe by the American army during WWII to bring psychological relief to soldiers on the battlefield. In the piece, the piano levitates above a white cocoon-shaped form which recurs throughout Kiswanson’s art and signals transformation and change. In his hands, the piano becomes a vessel of solace and recovery. It embodies the power of creation in the face of the ruptures of History. In these two long-term projects, which culminated, respectively, in 2024 and 2025, Kiswanson explores in great depth how objects born out of crisis can become vehicles to explore the human condition.
His recent exhibition, A Century, at Kunsthalle Portikus (Frankfurt) and The Common Guild (Glasgow), likewise brings together sculptural works that consider how objects absorb and transmit historical rupture. At its centre, A Century (2024) suspends four intertwined walking sticks dating from the 1930s to today, highlighting the fragile interdependence of bodies and histories. The Rupture (2024) captures a fortified black cloud of ink spilling from a British imperial fountain pen encased in resin, reflecting on the far-reaching consequences of colonial bureaucracy and political decree. This sculpture in particular demonstrates how objects can embody the weight of pivotal decisions whose effects can be felt over decades. The Silence (2024) presents a flipped-over UN helmet from 1948 floating in hazy resin, a spectral monument to both the promise and failure of international peacekeeping. Through these charged relics, Kiswanson meditates on the entanglement of biography and collective trauma, and the elusive weight of historical responsibility.
Tarik Kiswanson’s multilayered sculptural constellations – of precisely positioned found and fabricated objects, moving images and sound – create singularly immersive experiences. By situating works in unforeseen ways, he disrupts the scale and configuration of the exhibition space, dissolving the boundaries between architecture and artwork. This is particularly evident in the levitating spaces he constructs, where historically charged objects enter a state of ‘hypervisibility’ and seem saturated with meaning. These rooms within rooms function as transitional sites, linking eras, experiences and subjectivities. By exploring the language of objects, Kiswanson’s archaeology of memory gives voice to the unspeakable. Rather than reconciling the contradictions of our History, he makes them visible, underscoring their reverberations across generations and geographies. His works do not merely represent trauma – they offer a passage through it.
Tarik Kiswanson comes from a Palestinian family that was exiled from Jerusalem, by way of Tripoli and Amman, before finally settling in Halmstad, Sweden, where he was born in 1986. He spent ten years in London, where he studied art, before relocating to Paris, where he has lived and worked since 2010. Kiswanson received an MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2014) and a BFA from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2010). His work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions all over the world, most recently at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2025), Fundação Iberê Camargo (2025), Kunsthalle Portikus (2024), Bonniers Konsthall (2023), Salzburger Kunstverein (2023), Museo Tamayo (2023) and Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain (2021). He has participated in group exhibitions and biennials at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the 15th Baltic Triennial and the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art.
Kiswanson serves as advisor on the scientific committee of the Edouard Glissant Art Fund.