Klara Lidén: Grounding

Image: Klara Lidén, Grounding, 2018, video still.

“Klara Lidén’s video work Grounding (2018) is easily one of my favorite performance videos of all time. In less than six minutes, Lidén takes us on a tour de failure through New York’s financial district, where she performs her ardent disregard for rules. Grounding comments both on the forward-imperative of the hyper-capitalist downtown and the détournement of urban space, and for some even includes a speculative narrative about ‘the fall of the artist.’

Having often worked in urban settings with partially dehumanized and stoic performers (I even called them placeholders), I was immediately drawn into the work by the deliberate absence of acting. Lidén avoids any glimpse of obvious slapstick, protagonistic heroism, or certain identity markers such as class or gender as she performs her determined stroll around the block.

Dressed in a timeless black artist’s uniform, her placeholder interrupts the reality of the proudly rebuilt, but utterly lifeless district and merges it with a gesture of artistic freedom. Her trips and falls evoke an invitation to not play by the rules – similar to those invisible balls handled by tennis-playing mimes at the conclusion of Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Reality is deceiving.” – Niklas Goldbach

Proposed by Niklas Goldbach in the context of his solo exhibition The Paradise Machine at theHMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein at the Dortmunder U, Level 3 (until 1 September 2024).

Inspired by the 1991 music video for Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy, Grounding (2018) follows the artist as she walks through the streets of New York City’s Financial District. In contrast to the original music video, featuring vocalist Shara Nelson strutting through the streets of Los Angeles, Lidén continually trips and falls to the ground as she passes by a number of iconic capitalist landmarks in Lower Manhattan. One man in a public safety uniform turns to her as if to help, but pulls back when he notices the camera. He has discovered the performance. In this moment, reality as-it-would-seem to the urban passersby meets the fiction created through the artifice of video. The backing music is wordless, as Lidén continues to channel what Helen Molesworth has called an “embodied silence.”

In Grounding, Lidén repeatedly enacts basic tenets of physical comedy—the trip, the slip, the pratfall—without attempting comedic effect. The allure of this video derives both from a certain voyeuristic discomfort and the pleasure of viewing the comedic trope as it is enacted by the artist. The movements of the artist’s body are alarming because they are ungovernable, breaking with unarticulated social codes rather than a set of defined rules. Grounding heightens the tensions that direct how one is expected to move within the privately-owned public space of New York City’s Financial District.

Rachel Vera Steinberg

(Source: https://jsfoundation.art/artists/liden-klara-liden/?lng=en)