5 December 2026—28 February 2027
Sculptures and spatial environments that open up a sensory and contemplative experience, where the familiar is subtly displaced and visitors are invited to explore boundaries and thresholds. Artist Tarik Kiswanson has been awarded the Stena Foundation Cultural Scholarship 2026 and is presented in a solo exhibition at the Gothenburg Museum of Art.
Using sculpture as his point of departure, Kiswanson explores questions of memory, identity and belonging. His practice revolves around displacement, trauma and renewal, and the ways in which individuals are shaped through encounters with different places, languages and cultural contexts.
The exhibition presents new works in which the fragile and the monumental, the transient and the enduring, converge. Central to the exhibition is Kiswanson’s long-term project The Relief (Steinway Victory Vertical, 1944), which takes as its point of departure the pianos and coffins that Steinway began producing in parallel during the Second World War. These objects connect questions of history, memory and loss with the artist’s exploration of sculpture’s relationship to the body, materiality and space.
Tarik Kiswanson was born in 1986 in Halmstad, Sweden, where his parents arrived as Palestinian refugees in the early 1980s. He studied at Central Saint Martins in London and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and has lived and worked in Paris since 2010.
Motivation:
In his artistic practice, Tarik Kiswanson explores how identity and belonging are shaped through movement between places, languages and historical contexts. Working across sculpture, film and text, he engages with bodies and materials in changing and often unstable states. His works challenge notions of belonging and memory as something fixed, instead making the in-between and the temporary starting points for an aesthetic of his own.
In his internationally acclaimed practice, the human being and space, the personal and the collective, come together in explorations of how experiences of migration and loss can take material and spatial form.
For a significant and innovative body of work that, with great artistic integrity, deepens the conversation about our relationship to change, loss and memory, Tarik Kiswanson is awarded a 2026 scholarship from the Sten A Olsson Foundation for Research and Culture.
The Sten A Olsson Foundation for Research
The Stena Foundation is an important institution in the cultural life of Western Sweden, providing a unique opportunity for artists to produce new works and increase their visibility. This year, four cultural practitioners receive scholarship to stimulate further development. Since 1996, the Foundation has awarded 182 scholarships for the continued training of talented individuals in fields such as art, music, theatre, dance, literature, scenography and circus art. Furthermore, the Foundation has awarded grants to many research and culture projects.
Stena Foundation’s yearbook
The Stena Foundation’s yearbook contains a wealth of visual material and longer interviews with all the year’s receivers of the culture scholarship. The book is available for purchase in the museum shop. The exhibition also includes films featuring the scholarship winners, providing further opportunities for deeper knowledge.
All recipients of the 2026 Stena Foundation Culture Scholarships:
Feline Andersson, Musical Theatre Performer
Simon Ljungman, Musician
Lydia Sandgren, Author
Tarik Kiswanson, Artist
The Gothenburg Museum of Art – the exhibition is financed with a generous support from the Stena Foundation.