The Brooklyn Rail

How can the artist, as a figure of solitude, be formulated collectively? What is the abstract form of a city archive, its metropolitan screen? How is lived experience subtracted to image? These questions arise as we enter, exit, and re-enter the most recent exhibition of Swedish artist Klara Lidén. Over out und above, curated by Fanny Hauser, is Lidén’s first institutional solo show in Switzerland, and a notable return to the Kunsthalle Zürich. In 2009, the artist took part in Non-Solo Show, Non-Group Show—a group show that staged her presence “Klara” as a solo figure in contrast to the other artists responding to her work.

Over out und above sprawls across the large gallery rooms of the Kunsthalle, separating installations and projections into two chapters: a bright ground floor and dim upper floor. Gang Gang Gang (2025), three temporary passageways, appropriated as readymades, staggered one behind the other, dominate the first room in a gesture of blocking. Repetition emphasizes the symbolic barricade. This passive yet frontal gesture transforms the passageways (usually protecting pedestrians) into a field of vision, both in distance and into close contact with the beholder. From afar, silver-white screens on the outside of the passageways appear as the only intervention. They are reminiscent of posters, but the blankness of the screen—metonymy of placeholders and potentiality—is fixed with paint on wood. Lidén refuses to convey concrete messages, but manifests precisely that in the form of blankness. The interiors of the passageways, on the other hand, are marked by graffiti and stickers. Less blank than the screens on the outside, but nevertheless in correlation to them, the graffiti tags and stickers are opaque, illegible, torn off, neutralized, and thus provoke—not least in a sterile art complex such as the Löwenbräukunst, where Kunsthalle Zürich is located—an uneasiness in our forensically “studying” the outside city. The lack of information enforces an uncanny feeling in front of the appropriated city archive and its dubious formalization of a metropolitan language as such.

With this in mind, Untitled (Thuk) (2024), a lightbox that again peels off stickers or covers them with a silver-grey spray paint into illegibility, almost resembles the Freudian Wunderblock, the “mystical writing pad”—a model for the impossible erasure of traces in the psyche. So too is Lidén’s Post-Minimalist practice of appropriation in terms of art historical remembering and forgetting. Lamp Post (Square Moon) (2025), a monumental lamp post, subtly alludes to Isa Genzken’s public sculpture Vollmond [Full moon] (1997). A distant memory in the Zürich show, soft as the fluorescent tube that only hardly lights its spacing.

In contrast, on the upper floor, Lidén immerses sculptures and screens in a subdued atmosphere of the city at dawn. In the dim perception of massive block sculptures, Ring (Zomb) and Ring (Nuts) (both 2025), five-slide projections show pixelated images, in which we see the artist alone acting in different urban scenarios—similar to her video projections in Non-Solo Show, Non-Group Show.

For the “Slideshow” series, the artist initially photographed her older video footage, then greatly enlarged the stills, printed them onto clear acetate, cut by hand, and finally mounted into slides. The effect is an ambivalent aesthetics, less reminiscent of, or rather in ironic detachment from, the photoengraving techniques of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, and much closer to the texture of the caressing pointillist drawings of Georges Seurat. Both Seurat and Lidén isolate the subject in public and show their absorbed action in profile. This draws the beholder into latent, introversive daydreaming about their actions, motivations, and thoughts. Lidén’s pedestrian body, however, also resists the repetition of the flaneur figure and rather works on a portrait of the early-twenty-first-century artist in its political antagonisms. It is this performative activation that, finally, gives a legibility to the work. The artist-performer acts as the figure of an anarchic protest outside or against goal-oriented economies. As such, the artist is acting often in a slightly slapstick, comical posture.

One slide pictures the artist hanging from a gigantic sphere, which calls to mind something between a disco and wrecking ball. The photograph reminded me of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s illustration of the life of commedia dell’arte figure Pulcinella: a neutral, parodistic figure read by Giorgio Agamben against his own and rather serious political philosophy of state of exceptions and bare lives. Pulcinella is the counterpart of a fragile, improvised life, to think with comedy beyond tragedy in a political register beyond engagement or disinvolvement.

Perhaps this is the point to ask: how does Lidén’s Over out und above relate back to her early practice in 2010, when authors such as Helen Molesworth and John Kelsey described it in terms of the neutral, of pure mediation and a suspense of capitalist time, and when Agamben was so prominently referenced in the press release of Non-Solo Show, Non-Group Show as an orientation point to rethink commonality?

Back then (around the time of Occupy Wall Street), Lidén’s tragicomic acting as a pedestrian body seemed to perfectly mirror a politics of profanation, dispossession, and destitution as articulated by Agamben and collectives such as Tiqqun or Bernadette Corporation. Destitutive (non-goal oriented, distracted, yet intense) action motivated Lidén’s blending of comic body over the pace of the metropolis. Her appropriation of objects as sculptures, leaving marks without legibility, corresponded to the idea of a dispossessive being in the world. Profanation was proposed as a politico-theological concept against capitalist segregation, to liberate and restitute spaces and lifeforms back to a common, collective usage and to forms of play.

Around 2010, Lidén responded to profanation with methods of subtraction and concealment. Veil and erasure turned concrete legibility into generic abstraction, but with time the removal, reversal, and re-inscription made itself felt indifferent to the very agency that is appropriated from the idea of a city archive. While I was writing this essay, I read a late ethical reflection by Jacques Derrida on an infinitely demanding relation to the other, which in thinking of Lidén raises the question of the public inscribed in the city archive:

This anxiety as to the name of the other … although I sign, the other having signed before me and marking, sur-marking in advance, my signature, appropriating my signature in advance, as if I always signed in the name of the other who also signs thus, in my place, the other whom I countersign or who countersigns me, who countersigns my own signature, the gift and forgiveness having taken place, or not, having taken place and having been nullified, carried away, without my ever even having to make a decision.¹

Lidén’s Over out und above and her presence in and around Non-Solo Show, Non-Group Show is marked by a conflict between the neutral and its somehow dialectically inscribed opposition. The work resists an unambiguous understanding, and it manages to stay problematic, aporetic, and difficult in relation to itself. For instance, a small, singular sticker announcing a demonstration in Germany in June 2025, “Freiheit für Palästina” [Freedom for Palestine], has been left untouched by the artist at the pole of Square Moon. The artist’s very intention of this noli me tangere is not explicit, but as an undeniable trace it points to what Derrida called the “sur-marking in advance,” a threshold for what could not be not left untouched. What then is the abstract form of the blanked metropolitan screen, of its language as such? Lidén’s contemporaneity, it occurs to me, answers with the double gesture of an impossibly neutral now, tracing its distance from 2025 back to 2009. The politics of the profanatory usage of bodies and spaces in the suspense of historical time might not always be a given anymore. The unprofanable is a concrete outlook or a true parallel reality. An inquietude surrounds the blanking of the city.