Tarik Kiswanson: The Relief

Through a complex and multidimensional body of work, Tarik Kiswanson explores notions of memory, trauma and regeneration. His practice examines how historical ruptures shape our present and shed light on the complexities of the human condition. He creates spaces where the intimate and the collective converge, inviting reflection on transmission, loss and resilience.

Kiswanson is one of the most acclaimed Swedish artists of his generation and was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2023 at the Centre Pompidou. His practice spans sculptural interventions made of found and fabricated objects, moving images and sound. 

At the centre of the exhibition stands the work The Relief (Steinway Victory Vertical, 1944) (2025), a compact piano created by Steinway & Sons in New York and parachuted onto battlefields in Europe during the Second World War to provide psychological relief to soldiers. The piano levitates above a white cocoon-like form which recurs throughout Kiswanson’s art and signals transformation and change. In the artist’s hands, the piano becomes a vessel of solace and recovery. It embodies the power of creation in the face of the ruptures of History.

In the video work The Conservatory (Saint-Denis) (2025), children from immigrant backgrounds attempt to play ‘Ode to Joy’ for the very first time. The composition, which became the official anthem of the European Union in 1985, is the final movement of Beethoven's last and most famous symphony, originally set to a poem by Schiller celebrating unity, friendship and peace. Their hesitant gestures, silences and repetitions raise questions about belonging, including who has the right to call themselves European and how open Europe truly is.

Kiswanson alters the scale and configuration of the space, blurring the boundary between architecture and artwork. This is particularly evident in the levitating spaces he constructs, where historically charged objects enter a state of ‘hypervisibility’ and seem saturated with meaning. His rooms within rooms function as transitional sites, linking eras, experiences and subjectivities.

By exploring the language of objects, Kiswanson’s archaeology of memory gives voice to the unspeakable. Rather than reconciling the contradictions of our History, he makes them visible, underscoring their reverberations across generations and geographies. His works do not merely represent trauma – they offer a passage through it.

 Curator: Sara Arrhenius

A large number of the works in this exhibition were created specifically for the Institut suédois; all are being presented in France for the first time.

Tarik Kiswanson was born in 1986 in Halmstad, Sweden. After a decade in London, where he studied art, he moved to Paris in 2010, where he continues to live and work. His work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions all over the world, most recently at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2025), Fundação Iberê Camargo (2025), Kunsthalle Portikus (2024), Bonniers Konsthall (2023), Salzburger Kunstverein (2023), Museo Tamayo (2023) and Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain (2021). He has participated in group exhibitions and biennials at institutions such as Centre Pompidou, the 15th Baltic Triennial and the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art.

An accompanying programme invites poetry, oral tradition and film into a dialogue with the exhibition. The guest poets—influential figures in the literary worlds of France and Sweden—bring their singular and powerful perspectives to the themes, influences and practices that shape Kiswanson’s art and poetry.