Klara Liden Kunstwerke

"Part of me is this poor architect dealing with the problem of existing structures in the city, part of me is this amateur dancer who wants to return ideas of rhythm to the activity of building, or of re-appropriating the built environment."

Klara Lidén

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.