Move | Tarik Kiswanson

Interview with Tarik Kiswanson

The project you are working on specifically for MOVE combines an in-situ installation, a sound composition, a performance and a video piece. These are new pieces, yet they are a continuation of your past Work. How did you articulate together all these different elements?
The core of the Work resides in-between everything that is here. Between the sound and the performance, between the performance and the sculpture, the sculpture and the film, and at the heart of it all, is a preadolescent. It’s a cosmology of Work of art where everything gravitates around him. He comes to life at the junction of these elements. He is the script. He is a weaving. He is mixed-race. He is born in-between cultures. He is “post-diaspora”.
I wanted to create an environment where separate works contaminate each other and in doing so produce the final piece - an elusive form that changes at the rhythm of time and space. Like a living organism, the piece comes to life through three pre-adolescent mixed-race performers.
Their voices during the performance is part of the sound creation, also part of the film and which gives us the impression of seeing the world through their eyes.
It has been several years now since preadolescence is at the heart of my work. The age of uncertainty, the age of ambiguity and above all, the age when one becomes truly present to the world.

This year, MOVE addresses the theme of conscious and unconscious memories carried by the body. Your work approaches on several themes such as multiplication and disintegration, hybridity, weaving and polyphony. But it also includes fragments linked to your personal history (here for example, the costumes will carry the imprint of traditional Arabic clothes) and to your family, who left Palestine to migrate to Sweden, where you were born. Your work also questions what survives to migrations. How do you relate this remembrance theme with your work?
Born into a Western society one sometimes has the impression of suffering from “memory loss”, since one is meant to understand a past one hasn’t witnessed. It even goes beyond understanding: we are meant to feel a sense of affiliation to the culture we have inherited through family. It is most commonly the case, and it is true for me. But the question is : how is identity shaped in this fertile in-between state? In my first productions, I turned to fragments of family history for possible answers.
Memory in fact, seems to exist far beyond each one lived experience.
I have always work by actively using the past in order to create the present. By « past » I mean a tangible and physical reality. Most often they are objects from the past and their silent memories, like a silver spoon for instance that followed my family’s exile, which took them from Palestine to Sweden. Or as another example, a black and white photograph dating from the beginning of the 20th century, showing members of my family dressed in traditional costumes.
These things are not merely passive objects, but they have a social life shaped by transactions they have been subjected to. I remember a quote by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai : “All things are the concealed moments of a longer social trajectory. All things keep are brief deposits of this or that property, photographs that conceal the reality of the motion from which their objecthood is a momentary respite.”
It is in the mutation and resurrection of objects and shapes that a lot of my work has evolved. The silver spoon I spoke about was melted and now it is what holds my brass sculptures together in the series “What we remember”.
For the photographs, hundreds of microscopic details sampled from the small photographs, were used as the basis for larges wall metal weavings entitled “The weavers’ machines”, pieces on which I have worked for several years.
Here, as you mentioned it, the past plays again an important part in my work, perhaps in a more haunting and ghostly manner than before.
I have always been fascinated with “roots”, by the idea of going to the root of things, or as we also say, going to the core of things. Here, by dematerializing, distorting, and melting the past, I wanted it – the past – to become skeletal and transparent, I wanted to pierce it with light.
To create the costumes of the performance, I borrowed dresses from the Tiraz Foundation in Amman, Jordan. It is one of the largest collections of Middle Eastern, North African and Asian traditional costumes. The collection spans over two centuries and is remarkable exploration of a textile heritage from regions as far as Uzbekistan.
The dresses were x-ray scanned and what we see on the boys is the result of a collage of these scans combined with garments from the boys’ own wardrobes, which are highly influenced by sportswear. Each boy is a carrier of the past and the present. Hundreds of years of heritage compressed into one costume.
Present in the scans are also embroidered texts written in different languages: Arabic, French, etc. These are extracts from sound work or old texts. The poems are a scattered exploration of language and of the human condition. They speak about the highly complex process of the coming of age, even more so for those individuals from the first-generation of immigrants.
We have entered dark times where nationalism and white supremacy are gaining more and more ground. And to be mixed-race or a first-generation immigrant in this political context, is in itself a form of resistance. We are the contradiction, we are the anti-border by definition. There is a new world being created in the European cities’ suburbs, where there is a high population of immigrants, just like in the one I was brought up. There, the process of mixing and merging transcend all status quo. It leaves behind any question on skin-color, on race and origin, to anchor itself in something much more profound:  our most basic needs as humans to survive, to adapt and to grow. We should pay more attention to these communities. I see them as the most revolutionary examples of a possible co-existence in our modern society.

You have been collaborating for a long time with 11-year-olds, who precisely experience the age of preadolescence. What interests you in this specific state ?
It’s about those in-between years when a child transforms into an adolescent.
This is the time when the transformation of the body is at its fastest but more importantly, this is when one becomes truly conscious of the world, of one’s unique position and that of the others in this world. It is the age when one becomes “identity-conscious” and starts to build and strengthens its own identity.
It is also the age when one starts to understand the meaning of notions such as race and opposition, desire, privilege, poverty, politics and democracy. The individual is totally extroverted, ready to absorb anything that comes in the way. As mentioned above, I have been particularly interested in working with children from a “post-diasporic” context. Children who have grown-up - like myself - in neighborhoods with a strong migrant presence and who come from a condition characterized by this duality. It is a rootless identity, born outside the idea of land and nations. I am part of a generation that has had to deal with the difficult task of balancing in between many cultures. This translates by the urge to live with the sensation of belonging nowhere, constantly suspended between the culture one has inherited through family and the culture from the Western society one is born into.
My interest for this generation has driven me to move beyond the question of migration. To not solely speak about it as a phenomenon that appears between Western and Eastern cultures, but also to consider migration flux that happens on smaller scales, such as those that resulted from the arrival of the Schengen Area and with it, its free movement policy in Europe. My first project with a preadolescent was with eleven-year-old Vadim. His parents migrated from Romania to France in the early 2000s.
These kids challenge the norm and have subsequently created their own ways of interacting, their own subcultures and languages. Moving beyond the question of origins, they form micro communities that exist beyond nationalities.  

You have also been working with polished metal for a long time now, sometimes to create sculptures consisting of hybrid shapes with drops of melted metal, belonging to your family silverware which has been passed from generation to generation throughout time. How do you play with the notions of reflections and retractions, which are very specific to this material?
My sculptures, as well as my texts, often touch on themes related to vision and perception, our eyes being the windows through which we experience the world and become conscious of our differences.
In my early works, I polished sharp metal sheets until my reflection slowly appeared on the surface.
I saw in this somewhat obsessive process a way of shifting my consciousness outside of the limits of my own body. To completely extract it from any physical container. Throughout the years I have sliced, weaved and transformed these metal sheets. It has always been about the fragmentation of the self.
I see my sculptural works more as situations than material forms. Within these situations everything becomes part of the artwork: the spectator, the surrounding architecture and other works by other artists if in a group exhibition. These are contingent works open to contamination. They adapt, absorb, refract and transform anything they encounter and grow up as they go along. In a way, their story is the story of any immigrant.