Tarik Kiswanson. The Rupture

About

In a complex practice spanning sculpture, film, sound, drawing and poetry, Kiswanson articulates legacies of war, geographical displacement, and trauma from the position of a second-generation immigrant growing up in a psychologically liminal state. The artist’s Palestinian family fled Jerusalem for Tripoli, Tunis, and then Amman, before subsequently settling in Halmstad, Sweden, where he was born in 1986. This seismic rupture fundamentally informs Kiswanson’s artistic enquiry. His interdisciplinary artworks speak of intimate, personal experiences whilst simultaneously reverberating with shared collective histories of diasporic movement and terrible loss. Conversely, rebirth, regeneration and a sense of becoming are leitmotifs of Kiswanson’s poetic material vocabulary.  

‘The Rupture’ (2024) which gives the exhibition its title, is one in a family of works in which objects are stilled and fortified in cast resin. At the centre of this work, weightlessly suspended in time and space, is a gold-plated Onoto fountainpen, manufactured in Britain in 1924. Black ink spilled from the pen is captured in the resin too, changing the atmosphere of everything around it. Symbolic of imperialism, governance, and class structures, this same pen was favoured by Winston Churchill, King George V and British military elites.  

For Kiswanson, objects such as these are suffused with history, memory and profound significance. The pen is representative of British administrative control and the signing, by Churchill, of the 1922 Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan Memorandum, which in turn ratified the 1917 Balfour Declaration. These controversial and contested bureaucratic decisions forced Kiswanson’s family, and so many others into exile from their homeland. Many such treaties and state documents issued by colonial powers carved up territories creating conflict, division and forced displacement across North Africa and the Middle East, with these decisions continuing to reverberate in the present. The Onoto pen was a subtle yet important actor in this so-called statecraft. 

‘The Rupture’ is presented in parallel with ‘The Silence’ (2024), a blurry resin sculpture that holds a reversed UN army helmet within. The sky-blue helmet’s distinctive presence here signals, simultaneously, armed conflict and ideological desires for enduring international peace. Both artworks are commissioned by The Common Guild and Portikus, Frankfurt.