In Anamnesis, Tarik Kiswanson brought together poetry, performance, sculpture and video in a sensory exploration of memory, identity and time. With levitating forms and layered texts, the artist invited us to reflect on who we are, what we remember — and what we forget.
+++ This exhibition ran from 14 May to 21 August 2022. +++
Tarik Kiswanson is a visual artist and a poet. His various bodies of work engage with subjects related to rootlessness, memory, learning, heritage and ultimately identity development. Always operating at the intersection of different cultural contexts, traditions and languages, his work poses fundamental questions such as: What is heritage? What is the body? How does memory operate? How are these notions affected by displacement and time?
Kiswanson’s exhibition for Muhka, titled Anamnesis, included drawings, sculptures, video, sound, performance and poetry. The term anamnesis refers to the idea of recalling moments from a previous existence. Our memory works in a non-linear manner, reproducing seemingly irrelevant passages and deeply concealed fragments. French philosopher Roland Barthes defines the phenomenon of anamnesis as ‘the action performed by the subject in order to recover, without magnifying or sentimentalising it, a tenuity of memory: it is the haiku itself’.
One of the central themes in Anamnesis was the notion of levitation, which was explored in the physical sense and also as a psychological state of mind. The exhibition consisted of different constellations of artworks and ‘primary forms’ that were conceptually interconnected. The works reclaimed time as they simultaneously alter our perception and bodily experience within the exhibition space.
Performances in the exhibition space
Kiswanson developed a performance together with a Belgian-Moroccan boy named Mehdi Ben Ayad, with whom he previously collaborated in the film The Fall (2020). In the performance, the artist’s poetry book The Window (2022) became part of a script written in three acts performed in different languages. The texts relate to sensorial states and existential explorations of the human condition.
About the artist
Tarik Kiswanson’s family emigrated from Palestine to North Africa in 1967, and later to Jordan, before finally arriving in Sweden in the beginning of the 1980s, where he was born. Kiswanson studied in London and Paris and today divides his time between Europe and the Middle East. His work stems from his own condition of being a second-generation immigrant shaped by the aftermath of diaspora.
Curated by Joanna Zielińska
Project supported by French Embassy in Brussels
Coproduction with Bonniers Konsthal
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