Tarik Kiswanson’s third solo exhibition at carlier | gebauer furthers the Swedish-Palestinian artist’s recent investigations into life and death, tranformation and being. In 2017, Kiswanson’s last exhibition at the gallery presented a series of suspended reflective, ever-shifting metal vessels which, by defamiliarizing our perception, also dismembered the illusion of a fixed, finite self.

Surging is attuned to a wider paradigm shift: the loss of grand anthropocentric narratives and the crisis of human singularity. A speculative act of worldbuilding, the exhibition leads into an elsewhere. In the redesigned gallery space, we arrive through a narrow entry in the main room. At first, it is unclear whether this transfixed environment, achromatic as if bloodless, indicates an ongoing catabolic suffocation or the premises of a new birth.

Kindly supported by Stiftung Kunstfonds & NEUSTART KULTUR.