Tarik Kiswanson

About

This will be his second solo exhibition with the gallery. Through sculpture, performance, and writing, Kiswanson’s practice reclaims and hybridizes personal, cultural and political histories and, in doing so, produces modalities of relation and perception that elicit the contingency of memory, migration, displacement, and interstitiality.

Édouard Glissant’s notion of the “poetics of relation” has greatly in uenced the kinetic and responsive qualities of Tarik Kiswanson’s work. As our contemporary moment is one of accelerating multiplicity, thinking relationally can help to actualize a shared world of “in nite difference”. Kiswanson’s practice seeks to translate this idea to the level of perception. A feeling of instability pervades interactions with the artist’s works: highly sensitive to their context, his sculptures respond to their spatial environment by multiplying, refracting, and re ecting their viewers and the surrounding architecture. Whereas Kiswanson’s previous engagements with

métissage — which can be understood in his practice as the merging and blurring of origins to uncover unwritten pasts—often had speci c material references (amongst other heirlooms, Palestinian embroidery and family silverware), his new works also emerge from a personal space, yet one speci cally invested in the elusiveness and variability of memory. 
 

The exhibition takes dreams, visions, and spatial sensations from childhood as its starting point. A series of slender, highly polished steel sculptures will be suspended from the gallery ceiling. Extending nearly to the oor, these hollow cocoon-like structures will appear to levitate. Kiswanson calls his new series of suspended works “Vestibules” — a term that refers both to the structure of the organ in the inner ear that regulates vision and balance as well as to architectural antechambers — quite literally a space between. These organic forms constantly vibrate and rotate. Their shapes are derived from elements of Roman and Islamic architecture, as well as small mechanical pieces used in motor engines. Called Father Forms, these new sculptures obliquely reference the artist’s father, who as a teenager served in the Jordanian Army
repairing engines and ventilation systems before exiling to Sweden two decades later where he initially found work in a metal factory and was an avid weekend gardener. The razor thin vertical lines of these suspended forms at times recall sharp, foreboding ower bulbs — evoking the contrast between the heat of mechanical work in the desert and owers in a cold, Scandinavian landscape.

Unlike previous sculptures, the new metal works beckon you to enter them. Each Father Form becomes a sort of portal, a vessel for a trance-like experience. Upon entering, the
spectator will become multiplied, obliterated, and disjointed by the multiple re ections. This sensation is ampli ed by the profound sonority of the work — it’s an experience that envelops the entire body. Evocative, quasi-hermaphroditic forms, these sculptural vessels blur the boundaries between inside and outside, opening and enclosure, the individual and the collective. The

spatial and optical experiences that Kiswanson creates with his Vestibules derive from the highly particular experience and perspective of a rst generation migrant. Hybrid, unstable, contingent: always both and neither. He pushes memory and form to the brink of evanescence, rendering them something new — something that fully belongs neither here nor elsewhere.