Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist at Kunstverein Braunschweig

Artists: Klara Liden, Karl Holmqvist, Adriana Lara (Guest room)

Exhibition title: WERK

Venue: Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

Date: September 10 – November 13, 2016

Photography: Stefan Stark, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist, Kunstverein Braunschweig and Reena Spaulings, New York

The Kunstverein Braunschweig shows works by Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist in a joint exhibition. The show presents both individual works and spatial assemblages that are the result of their long-standing and close collaboration.

In her work, Klara Liden detaches every-day-objects from their normal contexts and transfers them as condensed urban realities into the art context. Deprived of their proper function, the very forms of seemingly familiar objects are brought into focus. Scratched and used surfaces tell of the objects’ past lives, which were abruptly terminated when they were turned into artistic artefacts. Pasted-over with white, piled-up posters evolve into panel paintings in the group of works entitled Poster Paintings. At other sites, carton-constructions give room to video, where Liden herself appears as the performer. Liden decidedly circumnavigates social codes of conduct and stresses the resisting potential of the physical action like, for example, in her works Der Mythos des Fortschritts (2006), where she does the moonwalk in front of a city-scape, or in the calculated attack on a woman’s bicycle in Bodies of Society (2006).

Karl Holmqvist transforms spoken syllables, words, and fragments of sentences into Dada lecture performances in the tradition of the Beat-Generation, rich with citations and quotes, while the written word enters into artist books, sculptures, or wall-drawings. Texts – fragmented in a lettristic fashion and later reassembled, collaged, and condensed – serve as the material to play with. In so doing, the letters shimmer in a newly found ambivalence between image and sign. The repetition of syllables and slogans in conjunction with Holmqvist’s monotone way of speaking gives way to a democratization of the spoken and recorded words. Lined up on canvases, stools, or fabrics, they start to dissolve into regular patterns, a process, which alludes to the basic principles of concrete poetry and, at times, ironizes them. By articulating these identical phrases, taken from poetry or mainstream-pop, what is said, develops an unsuspected ambiguity.

In the video work Nhite Woise (2015), Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist connect in a charming yet dilettante dance performance.

Klara Liden (*1979 in Stockholm) lives in Berlin. The Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2009), the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2011), in co-operation with Serpentine Gallery, London (2012), and also the New Museum, New York (2012), have presented her work in solo shows. In 2011, she was nominated for the prize of the Neue Nationalgalerie and in 2012 she received the Carnegie Art Award.

Karl Holmqvist (*1964 in Västerâs, Sweden) moved to New York in 1989 and currently lives in Berlin. In 2003 and 2011, he participated in the Venice Biennale. Among numerous art institutions, the Bergen Kunsthall (2011), the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2013), the Camden Arts Centre, London (2016), and, most recently, the Kunstverein Munich (2016) dedicated solo shows to him. In 2013, Holmqvist received the Arthur-Köpcke-Prize.

GUESTROOM: ADRIANA LARA

Since early 2016 artists or curators have been invited to make use of the room, which originally served as the guestroom of the Villa Salve Hospes to comment upon and critically engage with the respective main exhibition. Upon request by Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist, works by Adriana Lara (*1978 in Mexico City) will be shown. In her artistic practice, the artist translates familiar objects into her own systems of order and signs.