Glasgow
Speaking to Flash Art in 2022, Paris-based artist and 2023 Prix Marcel Duchamp winner Tarik Kiswanson said of his practice: “It is important to me to create works that are coded. I don’t want art to be easy. I work from myself outwards.” In “The Rupture,” his first U.K. solo show (through November 30, 2024), there’s ample opportunity for the thoughtful decoding that he expects, yet thanks to the spare, crafted minimalism of the 12 works on view, the process feels anything but onerous.
“The Rupture” takes its title from one of two new works commissioned for the exhibition—a transparent, floor-based, cast-resin block with a gold-plated Onoto fountain pen suspended at its center. Trapped within, black ink swirls as if some kind of malevolent spirit had penetrated the resin. The specificity of the pen is important. It is British-made and of the kind favored by Winston Churchill. The “rupture” in question refers to colonial-era decisions that displaced and divided communities—including the Mandate for Palestine and the Transjordan Memorandum, which Churchill signed in 1922. The symbolism—historical, as well as deeply relevant to the conflicts raging today—is also personal. Kiswanson’s Palestinian family fled Jerusalem in the early 1980s, eventually arriving at an immigration office in Halmstad, Sweden (where Kiswanson was born in 1986); there, the authorities changed the family’s surname from Al Kiswani to the Swedish-sounding Kiswanson. The upheavals contained within the work are multiple: first, the physical and emotional shocks of displacement; then those of identity, family, the sense of who we are, where we belong, where we are heading.
Kiswanson’s art-making, then, is much more than an act of personal storytelling. As he moves “outwards,” he addresses wider realities of humanity, using a variety of strategies to explore ideas around what he has called the “constant instability” of identity, and the embedded narratives and meaning that objects can hold. His recurring use of a smooth-surfaced, angelically white cocoon shape, first seen in Nest (2021) is one such example. Here, Nest is fixed to the wall of the main gallery—two other rooms are also used—acting as acuriously soothing entry point into the feel and themes of the exhibition. (A smaller version of the form appears in The Wait [2024], this time resting on the edge of an iconic Ercolani chair). Almost seeming to float in the white-walled space, like a balloon kept in place by static electricity, it resembles some kind of benign, extraterrestrial pod in search of a new home; it appears both fragile and strong, in need of nurturing while at the same time offering a place to be nurtured.
Other works are less ambiguous about the combination of form and narrative. Foresight (2024) consists of a pair of beautifully made wooden chairs that have been fused together, one seeming to lift the other off the floor, making both unusable. The materials listed for the work—“George Nakashima’s chair and Adolf Schneck’s chair”—name two renowned 20th-century furniture designers. Nakashima (1905–1990) was Japanese-American; following the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, he was sent with his wife and daughter to a U.S. internment camp. Schneck (1883–1971), a former Bauhaus teacher, joined the National Socialist Party but was exonerated during Germany’s denazification period and subsequently played a part in the country’s postwar reconstruction. Conflicting biographies, contrasting outcomes—the tension contained within these entwined forms is palpable.
Throughout the three rooms, additional objects cast in resin speak of upheaval and memory—a silver spoon that traveled with Kiswanson’s family from Jerusalem, a 3D plan of the small Halmstad flat where he grew up, a partly used candle with dripping wax. There are also two short HD videos (The Reading Room [2019] and The Fall [2020]), a looped sound piece (Shatter [2020]), and one charcoal drawing on paper(The Window [2022]). Cumulatively, these carefully considered, exquisitely executed works operate like a gently disruptive murmur—a rupture in time and space that is perplexing yet paradoxically calming.
