Kunstwerke

Artists

Klara Lidén

Press release

Artist Biography

Klara Lidén’s (b. 1979, Stockholm) multidisciplinary practice evades straightforward categorization, traversing a range of media including video, performance, sculpture, structural intervention, and installation. The work often incorporates materials sourced from urban loci, which are dismantled and reconfigured, rendered anew and ripe for re-encounter with an inventive, at times playful verve – a process the artist describes as “unbuilding.” Engaging with architecture and its environments, as well as the social constructs surrounding material function, the practice centres around the body in relation to these elements. It is marked by an enduring exploration of the physical and psychological bounds of inhabited space, both public and private.

Klara Lidén lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Over out und above at Kunsthalle Zürich (2025); Square Moon at Sadie Coles, London (2024); VERDEBELVEDERE at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York (2024); (0, 0, 0) at Galerie Neu, Berlin (2023); BABARUE at 0CTO, Marseille (2022); Auf jeden Fall, Secession, Vienna (2019); Battement battu, WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2015); Invalidenstrasse at Museion, Bolzano (2013) , Bodies of Society, New Museum, New York (2012); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2011) and Serpentine Gallery, London, (2010).

Kunstwerke is the first large-scale survey as well as the first institutional solo exhibition of artist Klara Lidén (b. 1979, SE) in Berlin. Having lived in the city since the 2000s, Lidén has become a distinctive voice attentive to power relations, the dynamic between interior and exterior space, and forms of civil disobedience. The artist’s practice draws from the architecture and infrastructure of the cities in which Lidén has resided—Berlin, New York, and Stockholm—using materials from these urban environments.

Spread across three floors at KW, the exhibition brings together key works from the early 2000s to the present, including performances, sculptures, spatial interventions, and videos. Kunstwerke traces how Lidén tests the rules that govern buildings, streets, and markers of public space, often using the artist’s own body to reveal how such structures underlie our actions, and how one might navigate, even subtly reclaim, environments shaped through control and exclusion.

The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s most comprehensive monograph to date, co-edited with Kunsthalle Zürich and MoMA PS1, and published by Distanz.

Curator: Emma Enderby
Assistant Curator: Lara Scherrieble