The Serpentine Gallery plays host to a collection of installations that seek to challenge our accepted daily experiences in urban life. In Klara Lidén’s first major exhibition on British soil, the architect turned conceptual artist contrasts interventions in the city captured on film alongside those constructed within the gallery spaces themselves.
A lone Situationist, Lidén scours western metropolises such as Frankfurt and New York, ‘cannibalising existing structures and materials’ in order to uncover the rebellion hidden under the surface of our cities. The artist discusses the schism in her agenda as caught between the architect who must deal with existing structures and the dancer seeking out a rhythm of the built environment. Guy Debord, founding father of the Situationist International, is an obvious inspiration in Lidén’s preoccupations, the artist challenges Situationist rhetoric through pro-active experimentation.
Upon entering the exhibition, the visitor is confronted with the stacked belongings of Unheimlich Manöver, which sees the artist move the entire contents of her apartment from 2007 into the gallery. This dense mass of possessions seems confusing and unfamiliar in its abstraction; back-to-front books become an anonymous façade. The installation highlights how we each fit around our everyday objects and in turn how they mould around us. The familiarity of permanence is muddled by the uncertainty of everything being packed away. Yet this piece exists as a journal of the artist’s life, with peeks of books on Eisenman telling a story of her past.
Toujours Être Ailleurs (Always To Be Elsewhere) and the Untitled (Poster Painting) series tackle the placelessness and waste of printed street advertising. In Toujours Être Ailleurs, plastic billboards in different colours completely fill one gallery space rendering it inaccessible while in the adjacent space, piles of found posters are pasted together in thick wedges and mounted on the white walls. The density of the posters together demonstrates the disposable nature of life in the city but they also offer a material presence for a rich depth of memory and event. By removing these ephemeral phenomena from their context and archiving them in the Serpentine, Lidén uncovers a duality in the anonymity of background advertisements and their role in the ever-changing landscape of our familiar environments.
Perhaps owing to Lidén’s transient lifestyle between her native Sweden and Berlin, there is a tying theme of the storage and even compartmentalisation of memory; that this activity in itself allows the constant moving with limited trauma. Furthermore, The Teenage Room, a recreation of the artist’s adolescent bedroom entered thought a domestic door, suggests a certain masking of memory in promoting this modern restlessness; each object and piece of furniture painted shiny black, a disguise of identity but not irreversible destruction.
Video installations concentrate on the artist’s lonely journeys around the city with only skylines and streetscapes for company. These esoteric attempts prove a little isolating in comparison to the more immersive installations but nevertheless are an interesting insight into Lidén’s relentless testing of ideas. Here is someone unafraid to push the boundaries of the psychogeographic artist.
Klara Lidén runs until 7 November, Serpentine Gallery W2
