“3 summers” by Tarik Kiswanson, Fatima Moallim, Lisa Tan at Lunds konsthall

Tarik Kiswanson, Fatima Moallim, Lisa Tan, 3 Somrar / 3 Summers, 7 June – 31 August 2025, Lunds konsthall, Lund, Sweden, curated by Åsa Nacking, Laura Goldschmidt, Paula Luduşan Gibe

What remains of a summer once the echo of previous seasons fades into the present? The title 3 summers carries the weight of layered memory ,  as if each artwork were a sliver of suspended time, a quiet threshold where past, present, and future speak to one another. Letters become landscape, furniture takes on breath, a father’s memories linger in floating images. What does it mean to inhabit such temporal intervals?

Lunds konsthall, with its luminous, pared-back architecture, offers 3 summers a kind of silence that listens. We walk through the space slowly, the flow of visitors shaped by a rhythm of lofty openings and dense, enclosing walls, as though each work rests on a barely whispered stage. The three voices,  Tarik Kiswanson, Fatima Moallim, Lisa Tan,  intertwine without ever overlapping. What holds them together is not a curatorial thesis, but a shared urgency: to articulate memory as a layered, generational sediment.

Kiswanson’s Foresight greets us with two chairs from 1953, one by Finn Juhl, all elegance and organic grace, the other produced for Brazil’s immigration authority,  positioned face-to-face like bodies that never truly stopped waiting for each other. It’s a dialogue between Nordic design and bureaucratic utility, but also between migrations, displacements, and invisible inheritances. Their silent presence speaks louder than narrative: two absences, rendered form.

Just a few steps away, Moallim has turned the gallery into her studio. Her drawings,  made on site during the installation, don’t assert themselves, they settle. Paper and pastel become porous surfaces, absorbing the building’s lines, the stories of her peers, the passing of time. The gesture is immediate, embodied, urgent but never frantic, a kind of emotional calligraphy.

Tan, meanwhile, presents National Geographic (Epoch): 40 framed images, cut from her father’s old magazines. Once a slide projection, the work now unfolds as a constellation of visual fragments, evoking far-off geographies and intimate connections. The medium, photographic prints enclosed in frames, crystallizes a past and makes it inhabitable. The act of cutting itself becomes performative: selection, remembrance, transmission.

In each case, the formal choice, design, drawing, photo montage,  doesn’t decorate the concept; it activates it. Kiswanson uses everyday objects, charging them with history. Moallim lets the mark embed itself into the space. Tan translates private archives into dispersed visual narratives. All three operate along the edge of the intimate and the political, where personal time brushes against collective history.

We linger in the final room, hearing the soft rustle of paper, the ghost of a projection no longer glowing. A cut-out, a pencil line, two chairs whispering stories of invisible migrations. Suddenly, we are inside that memory: a tepid silence, a faint crack of color, a scent that seems to hover still.