Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, 14-16 February 2014
Part 2/5
Friday, and Valentine’s day, I went with Matt and Toby to the Moderna Museet which just so happened to be free entry to celebrate Valentine’s. The was a Gabriel Orozco show Natural Motion on but no rubbish on display. There was also an exhibition Dance Machines: From Léger to Kraftwerk which had a 3-D Kratwerk installation and in another gallery a ceramic tiled floor by Christodoulos Panayiotou made with Mediterranean seawater. The best part of the visit was I discovered Klara Lidén – a Stockholm street artist, inspired by the architecture of the city; placing bins in the gallery setting as well as making poster paintings and more ephemeral earlier works such as a postbox in Stockholm from which she hand delivered mail on her bicycle. For her solo show at the Serpentine in 2010, she exhibited Unheimlich Manöver (2007), everything in the artist’s apartment.
Serpentine’s blurb says, “Trained as an architect, Lidén has described her built structures as ‘un-building, re-cycling or improvising new uses for what’s already been set up’. Her public actions raise ‘the question of re-appropriating privatized, urban space… with the body, its ways of moving and the temporalities it engages’. Recalling a long history of performance art and conceptual work, Lidén reveals the hidden aggression and potential rebellion that rests under the surface of our cities and their inhabitants. Using pre-existing materials and often herself as the protagonist, she plays with ideas of violence, inner tension and disaffection using simple strategies and objects readily to hand. In an attempt to de-programme our behaviour and subvert our experience of everyday life, Lidén disrupts our shared and accepted social norms with a focused, radical energy.”
I bought the Moderna Museet exhibition book of her work from the book shop for SEK150 (£15ish) which was in both Swedish and English. Turns out she had won the Friends of Moderna Sculpture Award 2013 which has a SEK300,000 prize. Her show at the Moderna Museet doesn’t seem to be listed on the website, so it feels like a very serendipitous find, particularly as on the way to the museum I photographed one of the city bins on the waterfront (something I’ve taken to doing on holiday/festival/research trips as a kind of postcard).
In the afternoon, we took Toby to the fair and had a good look around. It’s a different perspective taking a baby around an exhibition, especially as I ghost write his blog, I’m paying attention to what he’s paying attention to. After a busy day, he tired quickly so we headed back to the apartment, but I had spotted a couple of rubbish-related artworks to revisit on Saturday and aim to exchange rubbish talk with the exhibitors.
