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Eröffnung: Tue, 18.07.2023 | 20 Uhr
Großer Saal
19.07.2023 - 10.09.2023

Afterwards

Tarik Kiswanson, Respite, 2020, resin, candle, 40 x 28 x 9 cm, courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg. Exhibition view Tarik Kiswanson. Afterwards, Salzburger Kunstverein 2023, photo: Rainer Iglar, © Salzburger Kunstverein.

Tarik Kiswanson presents a multi-form installation of new work in the Great Hall. Forms of rootlessness, regeneration and renewal are combined in this project through poetic sculptural and architectural gestures, where we see post-war histories eliding with contemporaneous experience. Born in Halmstad, Sweden in 1986 where his family exiled from Palestine, Kiswanson’s practice has been described as evincing a poetics of métissage: a means of writing and surviving between multiple conditions and contexts. His broad artistic practice acts as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes like refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, hybridity, and polyphony through their own distinct language.

The idea of transformation is central to the oeuvre of Tarik Kiswanson. That is, we see embodied in his sculptural practice ideas of displacement and metamorphosis, alteration and change, presented statically in form but evoking transformation in its essence. In Tarik’s earlier work, this was often through the prism of migration. To this day, there remains an echo of this personal experience. His earlier work would often make reference to his family archives and family histories, picking up the pieces of what was lost in the family’s displacement, and remarking on how memory itself fades along with the challenges in encountering a new life and home. This more recent work in this exhibition, however, moves into more universal ideas of transformation, where Tarik also makes reference to post-war reconstruction across Europe, and combines them with ideas of transformation as they appear in nature.

The cocoon sculptures themselves naturally arise out of the artist’s fascination with the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, which he parallels in physical form with notions of diaspora, growth, entropy and becoming. A sliding signifier between egg and seed and life and birth and death is also evident in these works. These works first emerged out of drawings by the artist, then eventually were shaped into sculptures based on the artist’s own body and scale. This could be seen as a kind of mirroring of body, emotion and experience for starters. They appear like pods on walls, echoing science fiction narratives for one, and geopolitical realities as well. The works have become larger, more monumental and more gregarious in their interplay with architecture—as if a being has planted a cocoon onto the gallery walls. Instead of evoking an idea of something magical, the artist instead sees the apparent levitation of these works as a central motif evincing rootlessness—as if one floats slightly above and away from the world at large, when one is uprooted from one’s homeland and cultural identity. Here we encounter a sense of hovering just slightly away from the world, a bit within, a bit without. These cocoons thus hang auspiciously from ceilings, appear in corners, and here in one case is wedged together curiously with a chair.

The artist has recently researched postwar reconstruction, especially in France, Germany and as well as in Austria, with one focus of his research being postwar furniture. Named mobilier sinister or mobilier de la reconstruction in France, this chair is one example of such mass-produced furnishings and furniture created for the general populace; elegant, simple, pragmatic and universal. It is thus such a coincidence that these chairs are in the director’s office of the Salzburger Kunstverein, one of which I sat upon for the nine years leading up to this exhibition. Unknown to me all these years is that these chairs were fashioned en masse as part of the general sweep across Europe to reconstruct society after the catastrophe of World War Two. The artist brings these chairs into his work, pulling this timeline into focus and into play with his concerns and experience of contemporary migration, flight and the trials and endlessness of resettling. While society was on the brink of complete collapse after the war, governments, architects and designers pulled together to encourage a societal rebuild. The artist is greatly inspired by these histories, and merges them with his work.

In addition to the idea of transformation, notions of what comes after an event of note, here come into focus in Tarik Kiswanson’s exhibition. The artist is well aware of other artists working from a diasporic position whose work evinces trauma and the need for repair as a trope appearing often in this work. In 2017 for example, in this same gallery space, we presented a wall sculpture by Kader Attia in the exhibition Invisible Violence, which I co-curated with European partners. This exhibition touched upon many of the themes evident in this current exhibition, and this artwork specifically—a broken mirror sewn together again with wire—beautifully illustrated this notion of repair after the violent fragmentation of self and society. Tarik’s work explores and evinces these realities as well and also moves beyond this depiction of repair to instead assert metamorphosis and transformation—a potentially liberatory rather than melancholic or traumatized expression. Naturally Tarik being in his thirties is from a younger generation, and thus takes on these universal and constant topics from a different time and place. He is rather more concerned about how one moves on from traumatic histories, enabling a transformation to happen while embracing the past and acknowledging his parents’ trauma. The scars and wounds remain from one generation to the next, however they are fused with the present creating a ripple in reality, an instability in form as we see throughout this work. This is a trembling, palpitating identity, unfixed as the ideas of Edouard Glissant’s suggest, constant metamorphosis. Tarik also employs a mirror in this exhibition, but there are no cracks to be repaired, rather a deformation of the seen, a recasting of self and being that continues and is never complete.

In earlier work, Tarik had sculptures of polished steel that created a mirror effect, reflecting everything surrounding them. The sculptures thus absorbed the architecture and other objects or artworks around them, and were in constant activation when encountered by people especially. These works were aesthetically and conceptually malleable, shifting from one constellation of meaning to another, never stable, as different visitors or settings completed them, albeit for a few moments. His formal concerns have shifted more recently, where he sees his work more akin to a threshold that reveals hybrid ideas of timelessness and the ephemeral as they interact with changing identity and future society. His awareness and remarking upon of traumatic histories—whether more recent or current—underlines this work powerfully, harkening beneath the surface of the cocoons for example. His deeply embodied link to his Palestinian background and all that suggests remains in these works, a combined sense of rootlessness and being and becoming between several countries (Sweden, France, Palestine) and five languages. This is however shared across more universal histories and experiences within the exhibition altogether as the works interact with one another.

His personal narrative of hybridity, displacement, longing and shifting identity has merged powerfully with a desire to explore and reflect collective human condition. Here underlying this impulse are many possibilities, including hopeful tendencies for rebirth, transformation and even liberation out of trauma, displacement and rootlessness. The home-shaped hole palpable in Tarik Kiswanson’s work remains, but Tarik is also interested in the “post” of things. He likewise acknowledges different passages of history and is highly aware of geopolitical catastrophe as it impacts countless people’s lives. This is, in part, emerged originally as a gift from his parents, in that what they directly experienced now appears and re-appears in many forms in the artist’s works as they unfold and engage with a vast spectrum of human experience and possibility. Text by Séamus Kealy.

Exhibition curated by Séamus Kealy.

Tarik Kiswanson (*1986 in Schweden) lives and works in Paris.
He is the winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2023. 

Kindly supported by the Institut français d’Autriche and the Swedish Embassy, Vienna.