Klara Lidén
Kunstwerke

An early photograph by Klara Lidén (b. 1979, SE), Self Portrait with the Keys to the City (2005), has come to define the artist’s two-decade-long practice. The keys are tools for opening the city—bolt cutters, wrenches, a flashlight, a manhole-cover lifter— used to test the rules that govern public infrastructure. Often using her own body, Lidén reveals how these structures script our actions, and how one might navigate, and subtly reclaim, environments shaped by control and exclusion.

Spread across three floors at KW, Kunstwerke brings together central works from the early 2000s to the present and marks the first large-scale survey and the first institutional solo exhibition of Klara Lidén in Berlin, where the artist has lived for over twenty years.

Trained as an architecture student, Lidén’s practice draws on public spaces of the cities in which the artist has lived—Berlin, New York, and Stockholm—using materials sourced from these urban environments. Cardboard, metal, concrete, wood, fences, and street banners become space-defining works; found objects such as garbage cans or components of municipal lighting are brought directly into the exhibition space. Lidén describes these processes as “unbuilding”—a deliberate repurposing and transformation of objects. The artist’s video works continue Lidén’s interest in thinking about how the body inhabits space, both private and public, and how these spaces define and control that movement. Lidén moves through the city by falling, climbing, and dancing in the street, on train carriages, street signs, and drainage pipes and, in doing so, engages with the aesthetics and mechanisms of social order – raising fundamental questions about ownership, access, use, and participation.

Curator: Emma Enderby
Assistant Curator: Lara Scherrieble

Early videos installed within the installation focus on domestic and public space, from Bodies of Society (2006), in which Lidén performs an elegant choreography while attacking a bicycle in her apartment, to Paralyzed (2003), where the artist dances on a Stockholm commuter train, climbs into the luggage rack, and hangs upside down from a handrail. Ohyra (2007), also filmed in the Stockholm apartment, captures a private violence with the artist oscillating between punching herself in the head and washing dishes. 550 (2004) is named after the street number of a Brooklyn home in which Lidén filmed herself moving topless while singing a strange, rambling song in English, German, and Spanish about needing more space. Music plays an important role in Lidén’s work: in early videos, the artist wrote and performed the soundtracks, later collaborating with musicians to develop compositions.

Lidén’s interest in dance is often apparent in her videos, from following the ballet class to moon-walking to referencing Fred Astaire. As collaborator John Kelsey has written, “Lidén has shown that when architecture is practiced with a body and as an attention to rhythm, we find ourselves moving very close to dance.” These dance-like, physically demanding actions probe the unwritten rules of public conduct. They express a desire to alienate materials or spaces—and bodies—from their prescribed functions, and instead, as Lidén writes, “inventing ways of making these things improper again.”

These actions recall the basic mechanics of physical comedy, yet they are stripped of humor. The falls are unsettling precisely because they are uncontrolled: they interrupt the smooth choreography expected of bodies in spaces governed by unspoken norms rather than explicit rules. In this way, Grounding sharpens the tension between bodily vulnerability and the demand for regulated movement within the privately owned public spaces of the Financial District, revealing the city as contested ground shaped by economic power, state control, invisible thresholds, and regulation, exposing how such environments quietly discipline those who move through them. As Calla Henkel writes, “We do not have to accept how things are. This is what Klara Lidén always reminds us with her work.”