Tarik Kiswansons’ art reflects his experience as a 2nd generation immigrant ARTnews.com

One of Tarik Kiswanson’s most recent sculptures, Nest (2022), is an ovoid shape made of fiberglass resin, larger than a human, its shape reminiscent of eggs and cocoons, as well as seeds; Kiswanson notes that the Greek roots of the word diaspora come from seed propagation. Especially as a polyglot who speaks Swedish, Arabic, English, French and Italian, the artist likes to have, as he puts it, something so dense or layered that it produces things outside of your body and your boundaries.

Kiswanson was born in Halmstad, Sweden in 1986 to Palestinian parents. When his father arrived from Jerusalem in 1979, he was one of the few Arabs in the city, and the Swedish administration naturalized their original surname, Al Kiswani, to quixotic Kiswanson. He grew up not in the posh part of town where wealthy Swedes have summer homes, but in the housing projects with other second-generation immigrants from places such as the former Yugoslavia, the Vietnam and Iraq. Paris-based Kiswanson finds it annoying that people assume he is a refugee because of his Palestinian heritage, as the exile took place before he was born. He said he moves between these realms of cultures, identities, languages ​​and the enormous anxiety I feel when I don’t fit in in black and white societies.

Kiswanson’s earlier work focused on his family, understanding who I was, where I came from, he said. To understand, I don’t really come from nowhere. An example, Grandfather’s office (2014), is a skeletal reconstruction of his grandfather’s filing cabinet, which his family took with them when they fled Jerusalem. Kiswanson recreated the form using strips of brass, between which he poured molten silver from heirlooms (such as a spoon and a necklace) to seal the strips together. My whole family history is anchored in the seams, he said.

Later, he began to focus on the experience of other second-generation immigrants, collaborating with tweens whose parents had also emigrated. In the movie The fall (2020), a boy named Mehdi, born in Belgium to Moroccan parents, plays with a pencil until it falls, then tilts his chair back until it also falls to the floor. The whole sequence was shot on a Phantom camera, which can record thousands of frames per second, and is slowed down throughout to keep Mehdi suspended in the state of instability; it cuts and loops just before Mehdis’ head hits the ground, so he doesn’t have time to be scared, even though he knew before filming that it would hurt. This intermediate state, which Kiswanson called the floating condition of existing, detached and removed from his own heritage, his culture, his country, his family, is where he likes to work. This is partly why he has recently turned to abstraction, as it is not specific to any culture or time.

It’s been a busy year for the artist. Solo exhibitions opened at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in April. Another will open at the Salzburger Kunstverein in Austria in July, as will a group exhibition at the Center Pompidou in Paris next fall, featuring Kiswanson as a finalist for the Prix Marcel Duchamp. As much as he enjoys his success, he feels it is hard-earned, after years of waiting for the art world to catch up with the hazy way he presents identity in his art.