PARIS.- 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.

Several of the works in this exhibition were created specifically for the Institut suédois; all are being presented in Paris for the first time.

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 multidimensional practice spans sculptural installations made of carefully positioned found and fabricated objects, moving images and sound. In his exhibitions, he blurs the lines between the architecture and the artwork itself, disrupting our spatial perception.

At the centre of the exhibition is The Relief (Steinway Victory Vertical, 1944), which features a compact piano created by Steinway & Sons in New York that seems to levitate above a white cocoon-like form. The piano was parachuted to Allied troops throughout Europe and carried across borders to provide comfort and psychological relief to the soldiers during the Second World War. It embodies the human search for solace, reflecting human endurance and resilience. The motif of the cocoon, which recurs throughout Kiswanson’s art, carries multiple, interwoven meanings. Often, it signals change and transformation, marking a stage within a life cycle that has both a beginning and an end. It also puts the viewer in mind of seeds, which can spread with the wind and—if conditions are favourable—take root elsewhere. The form becomes a symbol of migration, transformation and becoming.

In a video placed on the floor, students from the Saint-Denis Conservatory attempt to play “Ode to Joy,” which became the official anthem of the European Union in 1985. This was Beethoven’s last and most famous symphony, originally performed with a poem by Schiller celebrating unity, friendship and peace. Their hesitant gestures, silences and repetitions raise questions about belonging, such as who has the right to call themselves European and how open Europe truly is.

Kiswanson engages in a material archaeology of memory, recovering and translating the language of objects as a means of approaching what has happened, including the unspeakable. He does not aim to reconcile the contradictions of our history but to make them visible. We are united by the human condition, shaped by loss, migration, exile and reconstruction. Kiswanson’s works do not merely reflect trauma, they offer a passage through it. They become sites through which it is navigated. In this way, his art operates as a transformational space—where remembrance becomes an active process and where art may be viewed as a means to encourage understanding, resistance and healing.

Curator: Sara Arrhenius

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.