Tarik Kiswanson: Limiar

Threshold: passage or moment of transition between two or more states.

Tarik Kiswanson was born in Halmstad, Sweden, in a neighborhood populated by many first- and second-generation immigrant families—a spatial threshold between Europe and other parts of the world. His Palestinian mother and father had fled the war in Jerusalem and passed through Tripoli and Amman before arriving at the Swedish immigration office, which adapted his original surname, Al Kiswani, to Kiswanson—a temporal threshold of exile.

Without deciding to be definitively on one side or the other of his thresholds—and without fully identifying with a single language or a single country—Tarik Kiswanson grew up in Sweden, studied in London, and has lived in Paris since 2010. In the French capital, he works as an artist and writer, searching for languages ​​that allow him to reflect on wandering lives, uprooted stories, impossible translations, and ways of harboring subjectivities in horizons of waiting and suspension.

Author of poems and videos, Tarik creates sculptures as languages ​​in which forms, objects, and spaces are articulated to make temporal and corporeal notions something perceptible. Recurring elements in this practice are his nests [Nests]: works with smooth, white surfaces, carefully crafted, sanded, and painted, that establish relationships of support, suspension, and counterpoint with the architecture and with objects imbued with memories.

In the installation that gives its name to this, his first solo exhibition in São Paulo, the artist proposes an architectural intervention that subverts the usual perception of space. The fluid circularity of the room is contrasted with a suspended volume, which only reveals its narrow, high interior after walking through the space. In this visually penetrable threshold, three elements coexist. One is a chair produced in the mid-20th century by the Móveis Cimo factory, an example of a furniture line essential to the modernization of Brazilian design, having been adopted as a basic product for various government agencies. This model, specifically, corresponds to what was found in the waiting rooms of Brazilian immigration offices, accommodating the bodies of those experiencing a moment of transition between time and space.

Another element is a Catholic church stool produced around the mid-19th century. If religion itself was a structural vehicle for Brazil's colonial cycle of exploration, including the movement of sacred architecture and furniture—whether by sea transport or the reproduction of European models in the colony—this stool is part of that history. Made in Belgium or the Netherlands, it was brought to Brazil at the time of its production, then returned to Europe, and now returns to São Paulo. Designed to accommodate the body in repose during the liturgy dedicated to the praise of an invisible deity, this object now floats out of reach.

The third object levitating in space is Cradle [Cradle], the most recent of Kiswanson's cocoon-shaped sculptures, a presence whose scale and form point to what is absent. Bodies and subjectivities have passed through institutional thresholds – such as the church and the immigration office – structurally prepared to give name and destiny to lives in transition, indifferent to the always unfinished state of such thresholds. As is the nature of his poetics, Tarik Kiswanson neither explains nor represents the current state of a world marked by immigration, exile, diasporas, colonization, war, and genocide; instead, he develops a sculptural language that would not exist outside this world, nor without his own experience of exile.

One of the artists invited to the exhibition. Earth, fire, water and winds – For a Museum of Wandering with Édouard GlissantTarik is a reader of the Martinican poet, with whom he converges in the defense of the right to the opacity of identity and language. His work offers an opportunity for sensitive resonance with that which, in each of us, escapes rigid identities, cohesive origin narratives, and ingrained belongings – everything that vibrates in the presence of difference and the untranslatable, in a perennial process of transformation towards something not yet known.

Caue Alves
Curator

Accessibility

• Provision of catalogs in digital version that can be processed by reading and screen magnification systems (click here to access publications);
• Audio guide resources with audio description and video guide in Libras with Portuguese subtitles in the exhibitions;
• Digital Libras tool;
• Use of descriptive captions and alternative text in social media posts, with the hashtag #VideoDescription and hashtag #ForEveryoneToSee;
• Provision of tactile and multisensory materials of works from the collection

In addition to the above measures, it is possible to schedule with the Educational free guided tours with educators for the public deaf, visually impaired, physically or intellectually disabled, and users of mental health equipment and situation of social vulnerability and alternative schedules planned for public service within the Autism Spectrum Disorder according to the distinct characteristics of each subject considered in relation to: socialization, sensoriality, communicability and autonomy. Request by email educational@mam.org.br.

Sign language interpreter and live audio description for activities upon request up to 48 hours in advance, request by email educational@mam.org.br.

In certain activities, additional accessibility measures may be offered, which will be indicated in the promotional materials.