The Common Guild presents Tarik Kiswanson, ‘The Rupture’, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK. ‘The Rupture’ is a significant exhibition of newly commissioned and recently conceived artworks, as well as the first exhibition to take place in our new permanent premises at 5 Florence Street, a former school building in Glasgow.

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.

thecommonguild.org.uk/programme/tarik-kiswanson