Tarik Kiswanson

Tarik Kiswanson—the winner of the 2023 Marcel Duchamp Prize—produces sculpture, writing, performance, drawing, sound, and video works. Notions of rootlessness, regeneration, and renewal are central themes in his practice. 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 seen 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 Kiswanson’s works and is indispensable to both their form and the modes of sensing they generate. The artist’s Palestinian family left Jerusalem for North Africa—and then Jordan—before subsequently settling in Sweden, where he was born. Over the years, his artistic inquiry has retained an attachment to the intimate and personal, while simultaneously speaking to universal concerns relative to the human condition and to social and collective histories of rupture, loss, and regeneration.

Tarik Kiswanson (b. 1986, Halmstad, Sweden) received his MFA from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and BFA from Central Saint Martins-University of the Arts London. Recent exhibitions include Centre Pompidou (2023), Bonniers Konsthall (2023), Museo Tamayo (2023), Salzburger Kunstverein (2023), Gothenburg Biennial (2023), M HKA-Museum of contemporary art Antwerp (2022), Hallands Konstmuseum (2022), 16th Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art (2022), Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain (2021), The Ural Biennial (2019), Performa 19 Biennial (2019), Centre Pompidou (2018), 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018), MUDAM-Museum of Contemporary Art Luxembourg (2017). He lives and works in Paris, France.