Klara Lidén: Always Be Elsewhere

Jeu de Paume, Paris

For Swedish artist Klara Lidén, and perhaps unsurprisingly for an artist who also studied architecture, the spaces that exist behind something else are a preoccupation. Sometimes more literal (her 2008 installation Heating for Crows housed pigeons in the space between the gallery walls and a newly constructed white cube space within the gallery, allowing the sounds and scratching of the birds to permeate the space), sometimes more metaphorical (her 2003 video Paralysed, in which she danced with the abandon of a child on a Stockholm commuter train, created, if only briefly, a space within an existing space to question the often unspoken rules of public behavior), Lidén’s body of work frequently uses the idea of these obscured spaces to expose the conventions on which society, and sometimes art itself, is based.

In a move that somehow recalls Yves Klein’s famous 1958 Paris exhibition The Void, for her new project for Jeu de Paum Lidén has used layers of advertising tarpaulins to fill, and inevitably, block the entrance of the exhibition space. Here Lidén, however, takes a harder stance than Klein. He may have made visitors wait at a blocked entrance, but allowed them later to discover the empty room that existed behind. Lidén allows no such discovery. The contents of this space existing behind something else, and indeed where “elsewhere” is, can only be imagined.

June 29 – September 5, 2010 at Jeu de Paume, 1, place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris

Check out the Hotel des Academies et des Arts in Paris when you need a room – it’s home to Jérôme Mesnager’s  “white bodies”.

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Categories: Paris: Art

Contributing writer: Melissa Frost