TARIK KISWANSON

A MOVING TRUCK pulled up to my apartment building the other day. When it drove off a few hours later, someone had left behind a hulking old armoire. It was the kind of dusty heritage object that for our parents’ or grandparents’ generations had signified a great deal—respectability, investment, social mobility. But homes fall apart, tastes change, parents die, and people move away.

Tarik Kiswanson employs simple-seeming objects to conjure the sense of rootlessness that pervades our age. He presents his own biography in a careful and understated manner, but it feels relevant to note that this artist, who was born in 1986, entered adulthood much like I did, at a time when a great many of the world’s young people were beginning to feel untethered from any immediate template of belonging—family, nation, language, occupation. Accordingly, what stands out from the empty wardrobes, cribs, cocoons, and chairs that recur in his installations is their overall impression of weightlessness. It’s as if they were ready to be picked up and moved in an instant. When Kiswanson, who was born in Sweden to a family of Palestinian émigrés, graduated from Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 2014, the number of migrants arriving in Europe was rising but not surging. In the years since, displaced persons have become an unavoidable demographic and a humanitarian and political force in Europe (with anxious repercussions for contemporary electoral politics). Due to the compound forces of war, environmental upheaval, and political and economic instability, the world we have inherited seems to have little fixity.

It was against this backdrop that Kiswanson opened his exhibition “A Century” at Frankfurt’s Portikus this past summer. There, the artist presents a concise, object-based timeline of the years 1924 to 2024 that illustrates how far back our present concerns around itinerancy and statelessness reach. Portikus is an unusual building perched on a bridge along the River Main (designed by Christoph Mäckler, the schoolhouse-red building actually sits on a tiny river island), and its nearly thirty-foot-high ceilings lend the space a breathless verticality. As if to undercut this vaulted character, Kiswanson has intervened by erecting a high-walled corridor that almost chokes the space. When you enter, all you see is a single installation, A Century, 2024: four walking sticks, designed in the 1930s, seemingly floating midair and pointing in different directions, like the arms of a clock. It looks as though a group of wanderers just gave up on a voyage, threw up their canes, and vanished. 

On the other side of this corridor, the artist has placed sculptures that deal, like so much of his work, with the reconstruction of lost or almost-lost memories, objects, and spaces. Anamnesis, 2023, is a knee-high resin prism that houses a scarcely perceptible object. Within the work’s murky encasement, you can just about make out a three-dimensional floor plan of a two-room apartment, floating in the cloudy stillness.

Kiswanson was born in a suburb of Halmstad, a port city on Sweden’s western coast, and he and his family lived for thirteen years in the same social housing estate. Theirs was a working-class, multicultural district, where (as he told me when we met this past spring in Berlin) he did his homework while sitting on the building’s stairwell, meeting neighbors from Iraq, Bosnia, and Vietnam—until their building was demolished in the 2000s. Recently, he polled his siblings and asked them to draw a floor plan of the modest apartment they shared. Which was bigger, the living room or the bedroom? Each sibling’s memory diverged, of course, as recollections tend to. Kiswanson’s approximation, now rendered in metal, is an abstraction of the long-since-demolished home as it lives on through their disparate memories, a reconstruction.

Kiswanson’s works tend to oscillate between the symbolic and the poignantly specific. The resin sculpture The Rupture, 2024, also included in “A Century,” houses a model of fountain pen—a golden Onoto, dating from 1924—that gained popularity during the interwar years and was a favorite of Winston Churchill and King George V. The pen for Kiswanson is a way of summoning the domino effect set in motion by Churchill’s 1922 White Paper, under which, in Churchill’s words, the “establishment of self-governing institutions in Palestine was to be subordinated to the paramount pledge and obligation of establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine.” In the sculpture, black ink swirls around the resin like a spreading oil spill, suggesting the uncontainable entropy, and the indelible effects, of that fateful decree.

Nineteen twenty-four was also the year the Johnson-Reed Act was passed in America. This law—a xenophobic measure, later praised by Hitler, aimed at restricting immigration to the US—had the effect of curbing immigration of Catholics and, especially, Jews. Many Jews, in turn, went to Palestine. As historian Shlomo Sand writes of the Johnson-Reed Act in The Invention of the Land of Israel (2012), “Absent this stern anti-immigration policy, it is doubtful whether the State of Israel could have been established.” By showing how events from a century ago reverberate into the present, Kiswanson places contemporary issues—such as the war in Gaza—within a longer durée. Kiswanson’s art seems to be less about the specificity of the physical objects or designs he uses than about the decisive yet unforeseeable implications of human acts—the way that decisions made in one moment expand in scope as they ripple across place and time.

In another room, next to one of Kiswanson’s recurring cocoon-shaped sculptures (an egg, constructed to fit his body’s dimensions), sits the sculpture Foresight, 2024. The work is a conjoined twin of a chair: Two similar-seeming designs, by architects George Nakashima and by Adolf Gustav Schneck, respectively, are fused, one floating slightly above the other. Schneck (whose Tübingen chair Kiswanson appropriates) was a part of the Bauhaus-influenced Neue Bauen (New Building) movement in Germany in the 1920s, before working as an architect in the Nazi era. After the war, he was designated a “fellow traveler” of the Nazis amid the country’s denazification trials—public tribunals, conducted by Germans, that often resulted in the acquittal of everyday war criminals. Schneck lived as a free man and was active in the country’s postwar reconstruction efforts. (His designs still sell on 1stDibs today.) In contrast, the designer of the other chair, the Japanese American Nakashima, was given ten days to relinquish his land and was forced to relocate with his family, including their newborn daughter, to an internment camp for Japanese Americans in Minidoka, Idaho, where they lived from 1942 to 1943. Kiswanson’s superimposition of the two chairs doesn’t establish any real links between the two designers but evokes, in a disarmingly subtle manner, the arbitrary inhumanity of political upheaval.

Kiswanson’s exhibitions sometimes begin with similarly discreet architectural interventions. At “In the Wake” at carlier | gebauer in Madrid this past spring, just about all you saw when you entered was a pristine white room that seemed to levitate within the exhibition space (one of Kiswanson’s ovoid objects latched onto it, eerily, like a moth egg). When you walked around to the other side, you could view (but not enter) a shelter featuring overhead lighting, a gray filing cabinet, another ovoid structure, and an empty wooden wardrobe. The installation was spectral and strange and, like all of Kiswanson’s work, transmitted an oblique yet powerful sense of loss. His series “What We Remembered,” 2012–, includes skeletal metal sculptures inspired by the furniture that his grandmother and grandfather, a postmaster, carried with them when their family was forced to leave the Palestinian village of Beit Iksa, outside Jerusalem in the West Bank, in the wake of the Six Day War in 1967. They resettled in Jordan, where these objects were ultimately left behind. Kiswanson melted down the family’s old silverware and worked it into the sculptures’ joints. In the Madrid show, the filing cabinet’s gray, slablike form evoked the monolithic edifice of “security” that European nations construct. To me, it suggests not only the acts of physical border-enforcement but the more subtle boundaries of lost documents, anxious passport stamps, and perhaps language itself. Kiswanson’s family’s name was originally Al Kiswani. When his parents finally settled in Sweden in 1982, an immigration officer persuaded them to take the name Kiswanson—to ease the integration process, the official reasoned.

Several of Kiswanson’s performances and videos investigate moments of suspension: historical turning points (with their indeterminate outcomes) or states of limbo. For his Marcel Duchamp Prize–winning exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023–24), Kiswanson focused on the topic of reconstruction. The works included a wardrobe, designed by René Gabriel as part of a series of furniture intended for war victims during the period of historical reconstruction after the leveling of Le Havre (where Gabriel was employed) and other cities in World War II. Other times, Kiswanson’s homing in on tipping points is more intimate. The exhibition also included a roughly ten-minute video, The Fall, 2020, which is set in a schoolroom and features a twelve-year-old boy falling in his chair in slow motion. A camera pans across the near-empty room, scanning a wooden table and a wall clock. The boy—his skin brown, his fingernails clipped short, with a buzz cut and a Puma hoodie—sits fiddling with a pencil. Shot with a scientific camera made for capturing slow-motion nature shots, the film proceeds with a nearly arduous slowness. In one sequence, the boy’s arms lift, split seconds before he hits the ground, as if he’s about to fly. Then the camera cuts to a scene of a pencil trick: the schoolchild’s game of balancing a pencil on your fingers, continuing the film’s motif of suspended action. The film ends just before the child’s body hits the floor. Through simple means, Kiswanson tells a story—of prepubescence, isolation, physical and geopolitical precarity, “falling” through institutional cracks—in terms that are relatable and universal.

One of the first works I saw by Kiswanson was The Reading Room, 2020. The short film begins with shots of colorful books in library stacks. Its key visual effect is of blurring: A boy’s moving hand, appearing near-translucent, almost ghostly, runs along the spines of the shelved books. As he sits down in the Edward W. Said Reading Room at Columbia University in New York, the boy, whose real name is Ejaaz (age six, of Indian heritage), struggles to enunciate syllables. He mouths the words, stops, and flips the page before moving on to a new body of text. We can’t quite make out the books he is reading. The phonics are mostly unintelligible, as if he doesn’t really understand the language he is speaking. The film ends with a view of the child walking, barefoot, on a table. The child’s struggle for articulation resonates with Hannah Arendt’s argument that “even the terminology applied to the stateless has deteriorated.” But Kiswanson might see it differently. In his accomplished book of poems The Window (2022), the artist writes that “if the word is used, it will survive.” 

Pablo Larios is a Berlin-based writer and critic and a coeditor of international reviews at Artforum. 

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