Tarik Kiswanson – The Rupture

The Common Guild presents Tarik Kiswanson, ‘The Rupture’, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK. ‘The Rupture’ is a significant exhibition of newly commissioned and recently conceived artworks, as well as the first exhibition to take place in our new permanent premises at 5 Florence Street, a former school building in Glasgow.

In a complex practice spanning sculpture, film, sound, drawing and poetry, Kiswanson articulates legacies of war, geographical displacement, and trauma from the position of a second-generation immigrant growing up in a psychologically liminal state. The artist’s Palestinian family fled Jerusalem for Tripoli, Tunis, and then Amman, before subsequently settling in Halmstad, Sweden, where he was born in 1986. This seismic rupture fundamentally informs Kiswanson’s artistic enquiry. His interdisciplinary artworks speak of intimate, personal experiences whilst simultaneously reverberating with shared collective histories of diasporic movement and terrible loss. Conversely, rebirth, regeneration and a sense of becoming are leitmotifs of Kiswanson’s poetic material vocabulary.

‘The Rupture’ (2024) which gives the exhibition its title, is one in a family of works in which objects are stilled and fortified in cast resin. At the centre of this work, weightlessly suspended in time and space, is a gold-plated Onoto fountainpen, manufactured in Britain in 1924. Black ink spilled from the pen is captured in the resin too, changing the atmosphere of everything around it. Symbolic of imperialism, governance, and class structures, this same pen was favoured by Winston Churchill, King George V and British military elites.

‘The Wait’ (2024), also commissioned by The Common Guild, returns to a recurring formal motif for the artist, that of the cocoon, or as the artist titles them, a nest or cradle. With a matt-white surface and ovoid shape which seems to defy gravity, the cocoon is both a vessel and a shelter which often takes on the dimensions of the artist’s own body. Here, it is poised, almost levitating on the verge of a piece of post-WWII furniture, the Ercol ‘All-Purpose’ chair. Designed in 1956 by Luciano Ercolani, an Italian immigrant to the UK, the presence of this everyday symbol of British domesticity foregrounds immigrant experience, and the roles of support provided by immigrant presence. Ercolani would become one of the most important furniture makers in post-war Britain, greatly contributing to the reconstruction of the country on a national scale.

Cocoons for Kiswanson, are places of gestation, transformation and becoming. Looking at metamorphosis through the prism of migration experience foregrounds many of Kiswanson’s works. The artist is equally fascinated by the transformative passage from childhood to adolescence. This in-between state in a child’s development towards adulthood is explored in slow-motion video ‘The Fall’ and accompanying sound work ‘Shatter’ (both 2020), where an 11-year-old boy is shown balancing on a tipped chair, neither falling to the floor or regaining stability.

Further sound, sculpture and film works will be presented across multiple spaces in 5 Florence Street.

Tarik Kiswanson ‘The Rupture’ is supported by Fluxus.

With thanks to Portikus, Frankfurt, for co-production with The Common Guild, of Kiswanson’s ‘The Rupture’ and ‘The Silence’ (both 2024).

Tarik Kiswanson (b. 1986, Halmstad) is a visual artist and poet based in Paris. His work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, most recently Portikus, Frankfurt, Oakville Galleries, Ontario (both 2024), Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2023), Salzburger Kunstverein (2023), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2023), M HKA-Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2022), Hallands Konstmuseum, Halmstad (2022) and Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes (2021).

In 2023, Kiswanson was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp, and has recently been awarded the 2024 Fondazione Henraux International Sculpture Prize. Kiswanson’s current exhibition, ‘A Century’ is presented at Portikus, Frankfurt until September 2024.