Akeroyd Collection

Works

Klara Liden, You're all places that leave me breathless, 2020

In this approximately four-and-a-half-minute looped video, we see the artist climbing amongst an array of metal scaffolding. To a driving, distorted bass groove that ascends in scale, the artist physically toils with the structure and displays a palpable sense of concentration, her face marked with steely determination. The camera is not static nor logical in its tracking. Its orientation is dynamic and chaotic throughout. Roving like a second body in dialogue with the artist, the close choreography engenders a feeling of spatial disorientation, not only in terms of the lateral direction and motion of the action but also in the disruption it causes. The artist frequently appears to be upside down or sliding upwards to an innate sense of gravity. Occasionally, she is seen climbing across a pole with the ground above her head. Similarly, there is no seeming beginning or end to the task, no outcome to be achieved, no entry or exit point to the structure. It is almost purgatorial. We are in this industrial throng together, discombobulated with the artist, untethered from anything that suggests stability or purpose. Liden’s work frequently references urban infrastructures and poses questions about how the body might navigate and occupy them. There seems to be an upending of the top-down way in which urban planners prescribe our lived experience. The work suggests there is always a liminal space within such projects to commandeer, to make one’s own, to really live within. There’s a sense that activity needn’t always equate to productivity; that one’s agency in the infrastructural spaces – that so frequently inscribe us into particular modes of sociality – can be reclaimed and asserted in more embodied terms. Terms that we ourselves might define.

MediumHD video
Duration 4 minutes 40 seconds
Editionof 3 + 1 AP