A video screen rises vertically in the exhibition space, like a wall. The projection on it creates a partition, a sculpture that halts the viewer and divides the room. An endlessly slow video plays on loop, depicting a sparse and generic classroom. We see a hand dropping a pencil, a young boy balancing a chair on its back legs and falling. The hesitant pacing suspends him in the air between the floor and space. He appears to be levitating, yet he is actually falling toward the ground. The video, The Fall (2020) by Tarik Kiswanson, has captured and prolonged the boy’s moment in flight as he appears to hang over a precipice, outside of time. The boy exists in a perpetual present, beyond the physical limitations of his body.
Levitation, the idea of a body hovering, recurs in human stories like dreams, testimonies and futuristic fantasies. It can also be found in religious mysticism, science and para-science, illusionism and, of course, art. The possibility of floating in the air—leaving the laws of physics that keep us fettered to the terrestrial—is forever appealing. There are innumerable examples in art but let us dwell for a moment on one of the most famous: Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960). This photo montage from 1960 shows the artist in the process of throwing himself off a building and flying through the air. Klein maintained that the image was the reenactment of an actual event, which showed that he, a “painter of space,” could travel through air. To celebrate this unlikely occurrence, he issued a publication about the event that he distributed on the streets of Paris. In a sense, air was Yves Klein’s primary element. When he was very young, reclining on a beach in the south of France, he divided the world with the artist Arman and poet Claude Pascal. Arman claimed earth and Pascal words. Klein claimed heaven and signed it with a gesture in the air, as if it were a work of art. He dreamed of Air Architecture in which humans would be transformed into creatures of air; weightless beings that could soar, liberated from the shackles of materia and be shot into the future like air projectiles, without physical weight. Six years later Bruce Nauman made a laconic and somewhat acerbic comment on Yves Klein’s high-minded flight. In his work Failing to Levitate in the Studio (1966), also a photo montage, the artist’s attempt to elevate his body results in a hard fall onto the paint-spattered studio floor. The picture of his body, stretched out between two simple chairs, is double exposed onto a photograph where he is uncomfortably compressed on the floor. The work is a rude reminder of the futility of dreams of soaring and the inescapable weight of the body. But it also shows, which is highly relevant to Kiswanson’s searching and dynamic art, how artistic work is a constant process of testing. Nauman made attempt after attempt in the studio, often being rudely thrown to the floor in the process — yet the knowledge extracted from the process of testing is as important as the work itself.
Could one trace a line through the sky from the levitating artist in 1960 Paris to the young boy floating in The Fall sixty years later? Klein’s levitation is in many ways an expression of that era’s utopian fantasy of art and of the artist’s constant expansion to new territories. An artistic expansion, that more or less consciously carries its era’s worldview as a natural possession that can be captured and used. The story of Klein lying on the beach together with his friends Arman and Pascal, dividing the world between themselves in a manner at once arbitrary, self-righteous and playful may be anecdotal yet it is nonetheless emblematic of its time and the notion of man’s—the Western male’s—plentiful operating space. The main character in Kiswanson’s work operates in an entirely different realm in a different time. The work doesn’t portray a confident artist, but a young boy. The sparse look of the room and the clock on the wall signals the authoritarian and suffocating discipline of an educational system. The boy’s balancing act on the chair shows his only way out of a repressive and alienating situation. Kiswanson turns the camera away from Klein’s emancipated artist’s ego, the self-evident center of its own universe. Instead, the camera sees a child of North African descent, whose family has made their way from Morocco to Brussels. A life lived amid the fallout of modern colonization, migrations, and severed family ties. A geopolitical order that is also the historical prologue to and the base for the playing field that Klein so elegantly moves across. The child falling backward off the chair is not Klein’s self-assured projectile headed into the future. The fall backwards, in which the boy never reaches the ground but remains hovering in a slow present, is rather a possible escape from a context that defines and thus limits him. A fall into a floating, uncertain condition outside of time, without a certain future and without a common past. It is in this condition and contemporary reality that Kiswanson’s art operates.
Excerpt from the publication Tarik Kiswanson, Nest, produced in conjucntion with the artist’s exhibition at the Hallands Konstmuseum in 2022.
Image: Tarik Kiswanson, The Fall, 2020. Still from film. Photo: Vinciane Lebrun
