Tarik Kiswanson


Tarik Kiswanson is a Swedish, French, Jordanian and Palestinian visual artist. He lives and works in Paris.

Early life and education

Tarik Kiswanson was born in Halmstad in 1986. He comes from a Palestinian family who was exiled from Jerusalem to North Africa and later to Sweden in the early 1980s, where he was born. When his parents arrived at the immigration office, their original name, al-Kiswani was changed to Kiswanson. Tarik Kiswanson spent his childhood between Sweden and Jordan, where a large part of his family lives.
At the age of 17, he moved to London to study at Central Saint Martin's School of Art. In 2010, he graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts and moved to Paris to continue his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and graduated in 2014.

Work

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 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.
He is the winner of the 2023 Marcel Duchamp Prize.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions (selection)

Henraux International Sculpture Prize 2024, Henraux FoundationA Century, Portikus

Group exhibitions (selection)

Publications

;Exhibition cataloguesNest, Hallands Konstmuseum, Mousse Publishing, 2022Mirrorbody, Carré d’Art - Musée d’Art contemporain de Nîmes, DISTANZ, 2021
;Poetry booksThe Window, JBE Books, 2022

Artist's book

Becoming, Dilecta, 2023