The screen is dark. This void, this absence of information is moving, and it is a body. It is a bodywalking through a city which may or may not be being built as the void moves through it. Andthis shape, this person, this void, has the alarm bells of Grand Theft Auto; a representation of humanity in the surreal promise of space. What could this void possibly desire from this halfcity, half construction site, half city, half body of stagnant water. The void is now walking down a highway, back breathing. Shoulders steady. The information of why, or where, is limited to the slivers on either side, arms slicing its own film noir – drama. Splinters of cars throttle towards the dark center. Drama is presence. Drama is one step in front of the other. Walking. A commitment to an ancient form. The title of this show is (0,0,0), the RGB code for the color black, and like an ink line on a map, or a steel cable stretched across a river, it is the promise of movement.
Klara Lidén’s work is subtractive. It takes from the world and then strips it back one layer, revealing what is inside. The rib cage of city; a calcified stack of posters draped in a sheet of white so we can finally see its form, a haggared lightbox scrubbed of its type face, a piece of asphalt ripped from the road. Likewise, the extracted lights that line the walls of the gallery are a series of signifiers of collective containment. The bank. The späti. The gay bar. These are the orbs of promise that dot our routine lines of movement. Flickering, they taunt us. In acity that is almost always dark, it is deeply lonely to be a person, slipping between the (0,0,0) of the street and the fluorescents of desire and need. Lidén’s work reminds us that we are all criss-crossing each other on an unfinished grid, stable only because our movement makes the world real.
- Calla Henkel
