"Turn Me On, Klara Liden"
Sadie Coles Gallery
16.10.2020
“Turn Me On” is the first exhibition by artist Klara Liden (1979, Stockholm, Sweden) at Sadie Coles. Her artistic research being set on architecture and function, she often uses the human body as a symbol for humanity and society and places it in environments where its physical endurance is tested, as a metaphor for humankind’s mental grit. The spaces we inhabit are seen as our body and soul boundaries, and thus, us and them are melted into the same substance.
The exhibition works as a whole installation piece, comprising a vertiginous video, three inner lit industrial plastic containers that give the show as much warmth and comfort as they disturb you for their size and weird placing, concrete benches, street maintenance boxes and gas cabinets, without any perceivable intervention. A poetic assembly that leaves you unsettled long after you walk out the gallery.
Greek mythology’s Sisyphus, as is well-known, got sentenced to, for all eternity, push a rock up a mountain only to see it roll down to the ground again after reaching the top. A similar sentence may be seen in Klara Liden’s video presented at Sadie Coles Gallery. Although, instead of walking up, the artist walks through the mountain, and this mountain is neverending, and not a mountain at all, but the city itself. The thriller-like mood is given both by the background music, which could have been taken straight out of a 007 movie, and by the intensity of the movements of the artist, who slowly yet fiercely goes on crawling, hanging in tightly to the web of pipes, concentrated on the sole goal of surviving.
We are immersed in the city, there is no walking on, up or downwards, only through. Klara Liden shows us this same environment, in an almost sensual way, slow and delicious. We are all city worms, blind, and heading nowhere, believing we have goals and there is a worthwhile ending to this snail paced quest. In charge of leading dead souls to the underworld, Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus for his deceitfulness and avidity. Are these the same traits we are being condemned for? Or is this eternal molish crawling not a sentence at all, but the inevitability of our merging with the structure?
Sadie Coles Gallery
16.10.2020
“Turn Me On” is the first exhibition by artist Klara Liden (1979, Stockholm, Sweden) at Sadie Coles. Her artistic research being set on architecture and function, she often uses the human body as a symbol for humanity and society and places it in environments where its physical endurance is tested, as a metaphor for humankind’s mental grit. The spaces we inhabit are seen as our body and soul boundaries, and thus, us and them are melted into the same substance.
The exhibition works as a whole installation piece, comprising a vertiginous video, three inner lit industrial plastic containers that give the show as much warmth and comfort as they disturb you for their size and weird placing, concrete benches, street maintenance boxes and gas cabinets, without any perceivable intervention. A poetic assembly that leaves you unsettled long after you walk out the gallery.
Greek mythology’s Sisyphus, as is well-known, got sentenced to, for all eternity, push a rock up a mountain only to see it roll down to the ground again after reaching the top. A similar sentence may be seen in Klara Liden’s video presented at Sadie Coles Gallery. Although, instead of walking up, the artist walks through the mountain, and this mountain is neverending, and not a mountain at all, but the city itself. The thriller-like mood is given both by the background music, which could have been taken straight out of a 007 movie, and by the intensity of the movements of the artist, who slowly yet fiercely goes on crawling, hanging in tightly to the web of pipes, concentrated on the sole goal of surviving.
We are immersed in the city, there is no walking on, up or downwards, only through. Klara Liden shows us this same environment, in an almost sensual way, slow and delicious. We are all city worms, blind, and heading nowhere, believing we have goals and there is a worthwhile ending to this snail paced quest. In charge of leading dead souls to the underworld, Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus for his deceitfulness and avidity. Are these the same traits we are being condemned for? Or is this eternal molish crawling not a sentence at all, but the inevitability of our merging with the structure?
