The monographic exhibition ‘Klara Lidén’ opened in London as one of the Serpentine’s several contributions to the Frieze season. A young artist to receive such a showing, Lidén’s presence within the contemporary art scene has developed swiftly since she drifted from architecture in the early 2000s and most notably with the circulation of her video Paralysed (2000), itself originally produced for an architecture conference. Experiences of space inform the installation, video and print works on view, with ‘space’ overlapping and reverberating through its psychological, domestic and urban dimensions.
Throughout the exhibition the experience of location is expanded to encompass presence and absence, even expulsion, occasionally obstruction, and the recurring void motif is invested with a positive material value. The video 550 (2004) uses a Brooklyn apartment, dense with the accumulated clutter of domestic life, as a found installation environment. Filmed by Lidén during the inhabitant’s absence and without their knowledge, 550 permits glimpses of the artist around corners and through doorways. With her back to the camera and naked from the waist up, Lidén is captured, as though by roaming surveillance, riding a rickety exercise bike and playing an impromptu elegy on an upright piano—always framed by musty domestic detritus.
Lidén’s work is highly sensitive to its exhibition environment; the eerie and ambivalent sensibility that it invokes can easily become lost to unsympathetic spaces. As a solo exhibition Lidén’s diverse works echo and mutually reinforce each other without any collapse into the monotony that can be a risk in the monographic survey. The motif of the obstacle present in Untitled (Poster Painting) (2007-2010), a white poster pasted over a thick section of bill posters lifted from the streets in