Berlin

Tarik Kiswanson | The Reading Room

25.11.2023–16.02.2024

For over a decade, Tarik Kiswanson has explored notions of rootlessness, regeneration, metamorphosis, and memory through his complex and interdisciplinary practice. A legacy of displacement and transformation permeates his works and is indispensable to both their form and the modes of sensing they produce. The artist’s Palestinian family left Jerusalem for North Africa and then Jordan before subsequently settling in Sweden, where he was born in 1986. Over the years, Kiswanson’s artistic inquiry has retained an attachment to the intimate and personal while simultaneously speaking to universal concerns relative to the human condition and to social and collective histories of rupture, loss, and regeneration.  “Existing between different conditions and contexts has allowed me to zoom out, observe how things move, and then zoom back in again to examine what links us on a deeper human level,” Kiswanson explains. “It has rendered me at once detached from many things and simultaneously profoundly interested in what constitutes life, what it essentially means to exist. What is a body? What is heritage? And what is time? Those ontological questions have always been at the core of my art.” Tarik Kiswanson’s fourth solo exhibition with carlier | gebauer revolves around these fundamental inquiries.

Installation Views

  • Tarik Kiswanson, The Reading Room, exhibition view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin, 2023
    Photo © Andrea Rossetti

  • Tarik Kiswanson, Anamnesis, 2023, resin, cast with inox object, 40 x 28 x 9 cm
    Photo © Jean-Baptiste Beranger