High shelves, stuffed with household goods — bags, a vinyl player, shoes, boxes. At the outset of the first institutional solo show in Berlin by Swedish artist Klara Lidén at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, you can see what fit into her 30-square-meter Stockholm apartment in 2007 before she came to the German capital. Between the stacked refrigerators, the stove, and more boxes that surround the installation “Unheimlich Manöver,” three video works by the queer performance artist unfold, a body of work that questions the way cities are built through public-art actions, performances, and installations.
The opening of her Berlin exhibition “Kunstwerke” — or “Artworks” — centers on the private interior, both in the origin of the installation, which gathers every object found in a living space, and in the video works where the artist is seen inside homes. Whether it’s with a bicycle she strikes in a laminate-floored room, sometimes with elegance, other times with a blunt blow from a steel bar, until it slowly buckles and lies on the floor.
Or in a small, jam-packed kitchen, where the artist moves from the sink to direct confrontation with the camera and delivers self-imposed slaps, while enumerating all the things she should actually be doing better. Like the personal objects, this video feels intimate and revealing — “I didn’t visit grandma,” “I can’t even clean up” — in which external voices from society push in on the artist and she rubs up against them. The intertwining themes of privacy and domestic violence, further blurred by Lidén, also raise questions about how protective walls really are.
The Artist Becomes a Disruptor
In the rest of the exhibition, which at KW is shown across three floors of Lidén’s work, this perspective shifts: the artist becomes the disruptor and the voice against which the city itself rubs. Between rough urban elements like bus shelters, stacked posters, trash bins, and neon signs from which the artist removed or repainted all legible text and symbols, Lidén appears in the video works mostly outdoors or in public spaces.
Dance takes on a special role: she moves with hints of folk-dance and ballet in a subway car set to swirling rock ’n’ roll in the video “Paralyzed” (2003), or in 2018 she traverses Manhattan’s Financial District in “Grounding,” repeatedly falling to the ground and then, as if poured from a mold, pulling herself upright and continuing to walk.
Lidén’s Body in Action
Beyond the smooth surfaces of architecture — floors perfectly level, facades of buildings glazed to such height that they don’t fit into the camera frame — her almost slapstick falls carry both a wink and a moment of vulnerability amid looming metropolitan architecture. A banner on the building in the opening shot reads, appropriately, “The Money, The Power, The History” — there’s not a lot of room for people here, but there is plenty of space for capitalist interests.
The 2014 video “Warm-Up: State Hermitage Museum Theatre” places Lidén among people. In a ballet rehearsal at the Hermitage Theatre in St. Petersburg, she stands out not for prettiness but for her sturdy, androgynous frame among the slender, gentle, and conforming ballerinas. Here she appears in a room, yet the space is tightly defined by the body norms and expectations of classical dance, just as cities and societies follow rules. As in many of her works, it is Lidén’s body in motion that breaks and questions this rigidity.
