Tarik Kiswanson

Through sculpture, performance, and writing, my practice reclaims and hybridizes personal, cultural and political histories and, in doing so, seeks to produce particular modalities of relation and perception. The form and materiality of my work are inextricably linked to questions of exile, identity, and hybridity. I eschew a stable notion of  identity in favor of conceiving conceptual and formal strategies that articulate a fluid “politics of identity”— one that encompasses the various collisions of culture that have shaped both my personal experience and aesthetic practice. I frequently work with materials like highly polished steel and brass. The reflective quality of many of my sculptures, coupled with their sharp, razor-thin appearance, often imparts a feeling of instability. Highly sensitive to their context, they respond to their spatial environment by multiplying, refracting, and reflecting their viewers and the surrounding architecture. Édouard Glissant’s notion of the “poetics of relation” has greatly influenced the kinetic and responsive qualities of my work. As our contemporary moment is one of accelerating multiplicity, thinking relationally can help to actualize a shared world of “infinite difference.” My practice strives to translate this idea to the level of perception. Formal hybridity and multiplicity comprise the conceptual core of my work’s politics of abstraction and opticality. In some sculptures, multiple distinct forms fuse into one object, a chimerical quality that can only be fully appreciated through movement, while in others, the layered, reflective surfaces perform the simultaneous proliferation and disintegration of those who encounter them.