Tarik Kiswanson’s work encompasses sculpture, writing, performance, drawing, sound, and video works. For over a decade, the artist 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. In this lecture the artist will retrace his trajectory and elaborate on a selection of works that became central to the development of his practice. He will also discuss personal history and how his own experience propelled a deep interest for the human condition.

Tarik Kiswanson (b. 1986, Halmstad) is a visual artist and poet. He comes from a Palestinian family that exiled from Jerusalem to North Africa and then Jordan before subsequently settling in Sweden in the early 1980s where he was born in 1986. 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 was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2023. His work has been the subject of several 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 will be presenting his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany at Kunsthalle Portikus this summer, opening on June 7th.

The lecture will be held in English.