Tarik Kiswanson: Come, come, come of age.

Tarik Kiswanson’s artistic practice—which encompasses sculpture, performance, and poetry—evinces an engagement with the poetics of métissage: a means of writing and surviving between multiple conditions and contexts. This crossroad, as cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy writes, “is a special location where unforeseen, magical things can happen.” The reduction, refraction, multiplication and disintegration of form and language in Kiswanson’s work evoke the contingency of memory and polyphonic hybridity.

The artist’s practice to date has taken up questions of displacement and interstitiality that specifically relate to the context of what is lost, and what is gained, in the first generation of migration. His forthcoming exhibition at Fondation d’entreprise Ricard expands this inquiry to examine the human condition more broadly, the most fundamental borders—birth and death.

Conceived as a “narrative machine,” the exhibition Come, come, come of age, the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition in France, presents a sonic-sculptural installation. Kiswanson embarks on a new series of sculptures for the show, which create a scenography for a sound work: poems in the form of a deconstructed interview that unfolds between two figures. Their voices proffer fragmented reflections on questions of desire, corporality, birth, cycles of life-and-death, coming of age, and the construction of identity. 

Tarik Kiswanson (b. 1986, Halmstad, Sweden) lives and works between Paris and Amman. Solo exhibitions include ALL THE THINGS MY EYES DON’T SEE, Musée Gallo-romain de Saint-Romain-en-Gal, Vienne (2017); ONGOING REFLECTION - You, Me, So Many, Collège des Bernardins, Paris (2016); and See eye to eye, Les Bains-Douches Centre d’art, Alençon (2015). Group exhibitions include Flatlands II, MUDAM - Musée d'art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2017); The Housebreaker, Riga Art Space, Riga (2015); Les mains libres, L’espace 251 Nord, Liège, Belgium (2015); and Compositions, Metropolitan Art Society, Beirut, Lebanon (2015).

Exhibition curator: Jesi Khadivi

Press contact
Antonia Scintilla, antonia.scintilla@fondation-entreprise-ricard.com