Born 1986 in Halmstad, Sweden
Lives and works in Paris, France
For more than a decade, Tarik Kiswanson has engaged with themes of loss, memory, and regeneration through an expansive interdisciplinary practice. His works are shaped by legacies of displacement and transformation, which are essential to both their form and the modes of sensing they produce. While retaining an attachment to the intimate and personal, his practice extends to address universal concerns and broader historical, political and social narratives of rupture and reconstruction. His art engages with the architecture of the spaces in which it is exhibited, forming what he describes as “relational art”—an approach that transcends conventional modes of representation to create holistic experiences.
Tarik Kiswanson’s practice engages with material culture and the mnemonic capacities of objects, interrogating the enduring aftermath of war and movement across varied historical and geopolitical contexts. His projects examine how artifacts produced during or in the aftermath of trauma can be recontextualized as sites of resilience and collective historical consciousness. 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.
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.
Tarik Kiswanson is a member of the scientific committee of the Édouard Glissant Art Fund.