On the occasion of Tarik Kiswanson’s exhibition A Century at Portikus, Frankfurt, he sat down with artist Asad Raza—who also had a solo show, Diversion, at the same venue in 20221—for a rich conversation that reveals the intertwined nature of their artistic practices and philosophical outlooks. Fresh off a plane from New York, Kiswanson reflects on his recent work and the meaningful collaborations that have shaped it. In a dialogue spanning from Edward Said to Édouard Glissant, Kiswanson and Raza exchange ideas about art at the intersection of space and identity. They discuss embracing medium fluidity, the importance of allowing research to go beyond language and acceptance of the unknown in seeking to articulate the complexities of human existence in present reality.
TARIK KISWANSON
I just flew from New York to Italy, where I opened a show with two other artists, so I’ve been on melatonin to try to get on the right time zone. I’m quite dazed.
ASAD RAZA
Where are you currently?
TARIK
I’m in Paris right now, and off to Jordan in two days.
ASAD
It’s been pretty intense for you these last couple of years.
TARIK
It’s been a bit mad, yes, but it’s also been filled with very meaningful collaborations. I’ve worked with really lovely people. There isn’t a single project that I feel like I shouldn’t have done.
ASAD
We’ve both worked with Carina Bukuts and Liberty Adrien, co-curators of Kunsthalle Portikus in Frankfurt. Carina told me, “You guys have something very interesting in common about the way you use space.” So let’s talk about how you approach exhibition space. The way I see your work, it’s never about the autonomous object alone. It’s always about the experience of a person in a space. Objects are part of that, but they’re not the only thing.
TARIK
I directly thought of this when Carina and Liberty were talking about you and your practice, too. They were saying, “You have to meet Asad at some point because you would definitely have an interesting conversation.” It’s a great coincidence that this was proposed by Mousse. But yes, my interest was never in the singular object, but rather in how we exist in relation to space, to art, to architecture, to one another. This interest leads back to one of my earliest works, which I titled Contact Sheet (2016). It was a sheet of steel that I had polished until it became a mirror. The first time I showed it was in a group exhibition, and it existed in relation to everything surrounding it. Everything became part of the work, as the other works by the other artists were absorbed in its reflection. The ever-changing daylight in the space, and the visitors, were essential to the work too, participating in its constant transformation.
I think of a relational art. I think of Édouard Glissant when I say this. As a student, I was very moved by his words. I encountered his writing about twenty years ago and it had a particularly strong impact on my work in sculpture. It’s the idea of the weave that comes to mind, and then to return to those fundamental questions about what art is and what role we play as artists and spectators. For me it’s always been about working in space.
ASAD
Glissant is another thing we have in common. I curated some shows about his work and visual art.2 Fred Moten contributed an essay to the book for one of them, Mondialité, and he named his essay after a phrase from Glissant: “To consent not to be a single being.”3 An art object like the mirror you described, which is a vulnerable, dependent body that reflects and is in relation to the other bodies and also to the social and physical reality around it—that’s very much in line with Glissant’s idea about identity. So we’re not just talking about artworks. We’re also talking about our own identities.
TARIK
I remember that text very well. This is probably why his writing spoke to me in such an immediate way. Being a son of immigrants, growing up in a high-rise building in a multicultural neighborhood in a small town in Sweden, I was constantly moving between different contexts and languages, trying to find my place. Words that Glissant employs to speak of the world and identity, such as “opacity,” “transparency,” “weave,” and “trembling,” took physical manifestations in my works. To understand the self as something constantly subject to change, constantly in a state of becoming, is fundamental to my art. This sheet of steel that I spent weeks polishing—I didn’t fully understand everything it would open up for me at the time, but this work foregrounds many ideas that are still central to me.
ASAD
It makes sense you called your 2023 exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm Becoming. I studied with Edward Said, and I read a lot of postcolonial theory. When I started reading Glissant, though, there was another level—it wasn’t just abstract or philosophical language. The way he talks about the sea, about the mangrove, about rocks, is so physical, in a way more like a poet than a philosopher. And that’s an important part of your practice: that an idea is interesting, but there’s another thing, which is to work this out or to work on something actually physically.
TARIK
I think that’s also why his writing moved me so much. I had set out to be a poet at the time, but at certain moments language felt insufficient. I wanted to put my hands to work to say it more simply. I do believe a big part of making art is to let oneself create things beyond knowledge. To allow oneself to leave reason and language behind, to let your hands guide you in the dark. But I also have to say, these two practices are intertwined. My writing is never visible in the exhibition space, but it is the invisible scaffolding on which my works are levitating. Becoming was the title of the exhibition at Bonniers but it is also the title of one of my books.
There is so much to say about Edward Said. I can’t even remember the first time I heard his name. He wasn’t just important for his role in academia but his political presence had, as you can imagine, a great importance for exiled Palestinians. He was lucid and captivating. My parents and their parents spoke of him in just the same dimension as Mahmoud Darwish. I felt a particular affinity for his personal life, too. He grew up in the West, where, against much prejudice, he carved out his own path, which would culminate in his professorship at Columbia University in New York. I actually made a film at the Edward Said Reading Room at Columbia a couple of years ago. I filmed a boy, Ejaaz, a son of Indian immigrants, when he was at that exact age, between six and seven, when you have just started to learn how to read. In the film we see him pick up academic books by theorists like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Noam Chomsky, and Said himself. Stuttering through phrases on linguistics, identity politics, and colonialism, we hear sounds and not language. We are moving from the real to the abstract.
ASAD
I connect with the need to go beyond language. I also started as a literature student, and I also came to a certain point where language was not enough. It’s an extremely powerful tool, obviously, but it has this tendency to encircle and rope in whatever you use it for and produce more of itself. It can’t always enact certain kinds of bodily, emotional, spiritual, and material changes.
Speaking of books, when my father was a kid in Karachi in the 1960s, he befriended some people at an American bookstore who told him all about America and how great it was and how anyone can make it if they work. They told him that it was a place of fairness, not corruption, and so on. As young doctors, he and my mother ended up moving to the United States. Much later, he found out that these American bookstores had been set up in Pakistan because India was non-aligned (i.e. sympathetic to communism) and the US needed an ally in the region. The CIA decided to establish a propaganda operation, namely the American bookstores. The bookstore staff my father met were probably CIA agents, and I ended up being born in the US because of that.
TARIK
You also share something important with Edward Said here.
ASAD
Said was extremely important in my family when I was growing up, as Pakistani Americans following the political situation. We understood that there was someone who had a power of articulation, a power of charismatic speech, that allowed him to speak on behalf of a people.
TARIK
Said was one of very few advocating for Palestinians in the academic field in such a vast country, which already made him an exception, but he was also a professor of comparative literature. It felt like there were few things he couldn’t do with language. He represented something very rare in that sense too.
ASAD
A hundred percent. The first time I saw him in person, he gave a lecture about Adorno’s work on Beethoven. Whenever he would quote Adorno referring to a particular passage of music by Beethoven, he would play it on a grand piano. He was a concert pianist and a friend of Daniel Barenboim’s. It was amazing to see him in full flight.
TARIK
I saw a documentary about their collaboration a couple of years ago. When I read Said’s book Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), the autobiography that he finished just before he died of cancer, so much felt so relevant to my own life. I ended up using it as the main title for a trilogy of films: The Fall (2020), The Reading Room (2020), and I tried as hard as I could (2019). Three films made with three different children in three different cities in the world.
ASAD
You mentioned that when you were working on these, it was as if you were walking in the dark, not quite knowing what you were doing. I still have that feeling a lot. Do you?
TARIK
It’s important to have that feeling. I even think that always knowing where you’re headed isn’t good. Things need time to sink in. You read something that seems slightly irrelevant at one point, but then five months later, because of it, you create a work where something manifests itself in a way that you didn’t expect. When working with research, we need to be conscious of these things. It’s important to not lose the emotional, spontaneous, even spiritual dimension to art making, to leave space for it. To let go. To leave language behind. To rely on the subconscious. I don’t know about you, but I’ve definitely created work that came out in a way I didn’t expect.
ASAD
Often an idea comes from a place where you would least expect it, maybe a conversation with somebody who has nothing to do with your project. Maybe this is about being a channel. Things can come through a channel, and you don’t necessarily always intend them.
TARIK
Some people think of me as a sculptor, and some as a filmmaker, others think of me as a writer and a poet. What I think I really am is something in between all of those definitions. That’s actually where I feel my work really is, in that interstitial space. But with time, I find it more and more difficult to determine my role, and that’s probably a good thing.
ASAD
Not knowing your role is a good sign, that’s an interesting terrain. It reminds me of Eve Sedgwick’s book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), about all the relations between individuals and how structures can form from that. I’ve become a little more excited over the years about being in that unknown terrain, and a little bit more comfortable with not knowing what I’m doing.
TARIK
Yeah, I am also not governed by the medium itself. I take the path that works the best for the idea I want to convey. For instance, I don’t say at the outset that I want to do a film, I’m thinking of a child levitating while falling off his chair, and what medium would best allow me to create such an image. Even if a lot of historical research foregrounds many of my works, I’m often running on a feeling, and that’s very gratifying. I think a lot of artists are too concerned with what role they have or should have, rather than letting the ideas themselves take them in new directions.
ASAD
I also don’t feel particularly like I’m working in a medium. It was almost thirty years ago when Rosalind Krauss proclaimed that we live in a post-medium condition. Since then, I think that some parts of the art world went back into a medium condition.
TARIK
I agree. A lot of the constraints that we made for ourselves in earlier decades are resurging. At some point I also thought we had liberated ourselves from ways of working that became synonymous with different waves of institutional critique. I remember Andrea Fraser herself announcing the end of institutional critique more than a decade ago. Personally, I’m not interested in how art sits in relation to institutions, but rather in how art sits in relation to the world. In other words, I am not interested in art that becomes a commentary on itself but how we can continue to evolve and stay relevant in the midst of a political, humanitarian, and ecological crisis
ASAD
That’s good to hear. Contemporary art has to operate in the world beyond itself. The person who walks into Portikus while passing by on the street—that’s a person I’m interested in.
TARIK
I saw the Constantin Brancusi retrospective at the Centre Pompidou very recently. I won’t go into details about the work itself, but looking at the exhibition, it’s hard to comprehend the work beyond a Western gaze. I am here thinking of the history of abstraction. I think we both, through our cultural heritage, understand the greater political, cultural, and religious dimension of abstraction. We are not just considering the last hundred or two hundred years. Abstraction has a political dimension in our societies, and it always has.
ASAD
We are working on a longer time span: a hundred thousand years of human beings, or billions of years since cyanobacteria started producing oxygen on this planet. It’s a long chain of events.
TARIK
I’ve noticed how some try to understand my work through different Western movements. Yet, if abstraction has always been central in my way of working, it runs much deeper than the knowledge of art history.
One of my first encounters with abstract space happened in a mosque I visited with my uncle when I was about six years old. This was in Amman, Jordan, where most of my family have lived since their exile. The imam was standing, reading prayers, inside a tall white alcove cut in the shape of a dome. The walls of the mosque were covered with carvings and writings, but this particular space had been left completely white. I remember asking my uncle, why? I later learned that the white space allowed a pure connection to God. This was one of my first relationships with space. Abstraction most often came into my life through physical, personal, and cultural experiences.
ASAD
When I went to Seville and visited the Alcázar, I saw an Islamic way of dealing with space, and with white space, combined with certain European ways of dealing with space. I never saw those two things speaking together like that until I saw that building. And I thought, oh wow.
TARIK
I’ve been there. I know exactly the place you’re speaking of.
ASAD
We can try to open this world up a little bit. Maybe that parenthesis can be perforated and porous. Maybe we can punch holes in it that will allow it to connect and relate to other things.
TARIK
To have this capacity to zoom out in history, look at the bigger picture. A Century at Portikus is actually the only exhibition where I decided to work on a specific time frame, but this idea of zooming out and observing how things move from a distance is where I am. I can detect this capacity to draw in different timelines in your practice, too. Two very distant elements end up being in the same space, crossing in a moment in time.
ASAD
Yes, exactly. Crossing.
at Portikus, Frankfurt
until September 8, 2024
For over a decade, Tarik Kiswanson has explored notions of rootlessness, metamorphosis, and memory through his interdisciplinary practice. A legacy of displacement and transformation permeates his works and is indispensable to both their form and the modes of sensing they produce. While retaining an attachment to the intimate and personal, his work speaks to universal concerns and to social and collective histories of rupture, loss, and regeneration. Kiswanson’s oeuvre can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes like refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, and polyphony through their own distinct language.
Kiswanson comes from a Palestinian family that exiled Jerusalem, by way of Tripoli, and Amman, before finally settling in Halmstad, Sweden, where Kiswanson was born in 1986. He spent ten years in London where he studied art before relocating to Paris where he has lived and worked since 2010. He holds four nationalities and speaks and writes in five languages.
Kiswanson was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2023 at Centre Pompidou. His work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions at institutions, most recently at Kunsthalle Portikus (2024), Oakville Galleries (2024), Bonniers Konsthall (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). He has participated in group exhibitions and biennials at institutions such as Centre Pompidou, Kunsthalle Münster, Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, The Ural Biennial, Performa Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, and MUDAM.
Kiswanson will present his work in the 15th Baltic Triennial, Vilnius, in September 2024, and the Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennale in November 2024. He will also have his first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom at The Common Guild, Glasgow, in October 2024.
Kiswanson serves as advisor on the scientific committee of the Edouard Glissant Art Fund.
Asad Raza’s polymathic practice represents an expanded approach to artmaking—encompassing installations, writing, curating, dramaturgy, filmmaking, pedagogy, and organizing. It often takes local ecosystems and planetary ecologies as a focus. Across his work, there is a strong emphasis on the participatory and the performative aspects of art, as well as an engagement with all of the human senses. His recent exhibitions and ambitious public art projects, such as Diversion (2022, Kunsthalle Portikus, Frankfurt), Absorption (2019–, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Ruhrtrienniale, Essen), and Root sequence. Mother tongue (2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; Rockbund Museum, Shanghai; Sifang Museum, Nanjing; TU Gallery, Dresden), all involve both scripted and improvised interactions with natural materials. This entanglement between humans and their environments is at the core of his approach.
Raza’s work is also intrinsically collaborative, emerging out of multipart interdisciplinary dialogues. For example, each iteration of Absorption involves work with experts including soil scientists, horticulturalists, compost specialists, and organic farmers. Orientation, developed for FRONT International 2022, emerged out of dialogues with astronomers, physicists, architects, and musicians. In Raza’s practice, the artist is a director, a convener, a gatherer of beings who frames unexpected conversations between humans and more-than-humans alike. This porosity—suggesting new roles for the artist in society—is an important rejoinder to the limited, object-driven conception of contemporary art. His latest work will open in September at the Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana.