DISCO | KLARA LIDÉN

A city that never turns off, that day and night lights up with minimal and repetitive traces.
Klara Lidén’s work (Sweden, 1979, currently based in Berlin) is deeply connected to the urban fabric. In line with the multifaceted and stimulating environment she engages with, her practice unfolds through installations, public art interventions, films, and performances.
During the pandemic, Lidén questioned how to create her work in a meaningful way at a time when the city was emptied—devoid of the usual references and dynamics that typically contextualized it. Her habitual wandering shifted focus to the only constant presences—marginal elements that, in their persistence, took on symbolic significance and meaning.
Not without a touch of humor, she directs her attention to insignificant objects and materials: Disco (2020) appears as a junction box, like those commonly found on street corners in Berlin.
With a background in architecture, Lidén brings to the urban environment her interest in what she calls “unbuilding”: the relationship between social constructs and the material functions of objects and infrastructures, in an ongoing exploration of the boundary between the physical and psychological dimensions of space—both public and private.
Removed from their functional context, these junction boxes become monolithic, monumental—yet they remain vital in their role within civil disobedience, marked by graffiti that she endows with names and personalities. It is the nicknames, cryptic phrases, and signs that make them familiar and close to us, that connect us, guide us, and perhaps, prevent us from getting lost.

The artwork is part of the exhibition Graffiti,
curated by Leonie Radine and Ned Vena,
at Museion, Bolzano
On view until September 14, 2025
Museion

Klara Lidén
Disco, 2020
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, gift of Sadie Coles HQ, London.
© Klara Lidén. Photo: Robert Glowacki.
Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London

12/04/25