carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Swedish-Palestinian artist Tarik Kiswanson. 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 influenced 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 “infinite 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 reflecting 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 specific material references (amongst other heirlooms, Palestinian embroidery and family silverware), his new works also emerge from a personal space, yet one specifically invested in the elusiveness and variability of memory.