Born 1986 in Halmstad, Sweden
Lives and works in Paris, France
Tarik Kiswanson 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 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.
Kiswanson comes from a Palestinian family that exiled Jerusalem, by way of Tripoli, and Amman, before finally settling in Halmstad, Sweden, where Kiswanson 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. 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.