The 2023 winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, Tarik Kiswanson produces sculpture, writing, performance, drawing, sound, and video works. Notions of rootlessness, regeneration, and renewal are central themes in his oeuvre. Always operating at the intersection of different cultural contexts, his various abstract works examine subjects related to memory, heritage, birth, loss and belonging. His oeuvre can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes such as refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, hybridity, and polyphony through their own distinct language.
A legacy of displacement and transformation permeates his works. The artist’s Palestinian family fled Jerusalem to eventually settle in Sweden, where he was born. Over the years, Kiswanson’s artistic inquiry has simultaneously investigated personal and universal concerns relative to the human condition and to social and collective histories of rupture, loss, and regeneration.
Tarik Kiswanson’s exhibition is the first part of a multi-year project in collaboration with Executive Director Séamus Kealy.
Press release from Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
Image: Tarik Kiswanson. Installation view of Prelude at Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens, Oakville, ON, Canada, 2024. Photography by Jimmy Limit. Image courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery
