Over out und above
Kunsthalle Zürich
June 14–September 7, 2025
Zürich
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.