Klara Liden’s work speaks to the loneliness of a glitch in the city. The fox crossing the road. The streetlight erratically flashing. The moon reflected perfectly on the empty advertisement case of a bus shelter. These moments act like comets, tearing through our daily infrastructure, presenting us with a knee-jerk desire to share. To point to the fox. To take a photograph of the moon. To stop and stare at the streetlight. Because when the advertisements are quiet and the signs are empty, we are left to feel what is in between. There is a world of alternatives. An anarchic newness. A temporary override, in which the foxes flood the street, in which a collective voice could arise, where what is left could be re-used. Dinner tables appearing on medians. Compressed card board boxes used as benches. Kiosk lights stripped of letters hanging as stars.
We do not have to accept how things are. This is what Klara Liden always reminds us with her work. There is agency in the removal of language. In the deletion of the demands of the state. In silencing the desperate pleas of advertisements. We can still use what is here but it does need to be oppressive; there are so many versions of what is possible. The mechanical hum in the gallery reminds us of this infinitude, a sound created by the turning of seven tri-vision billboards. These billboards reveal three sides, each promising a steely surface. On several, Klara has turned the billboards inside out. The gray undersides of the paper now exposed to the world, provide a space of projection. On another, a singular line has been spray painted across it, an exclamation without the desire to direct.
Klara Liden has, as she often does in her sculptures, laid a paper-thin shroud over the world, enabling us, the viewer, to choose how to move. But Klara has not abandoned us to this craterous planet. On the three screens throughout the exhibition we watch a body, her body, clothed in black as it slips through the city. The focus of the camera hovers tightly on her, and again, the world is only graspable in strips which appear on the sides of the frame. The stairs. The water. The street. Now Klara is the knife, cutting her own line through the hard world, she is another exclamation without direction. An invitation to move. To reclaim what is ours. What is right here.
– Calla Henkel