Untitled (liegezaun), Untitled (wartezaun), Untitled (studyzaun) Untitled (liegezaun)(wartezaun)(studyzaun)

The works of Klara Lidén employ discrete elements of the built environment of public or urban space. She appropriates these elements to investigate questions surrounding privatisation and a disappearing commons or spaces for public use. Her sculptures and installations, which appear industrial or functional, recall spaces within a city, incorporating found objects, especially building materials or things culled from urban settings. At the same time, they seek to locate a resistance or rebellion in the use of those very materials: a potential violence, radicalism or anarchy. Lidéns themes are city life and its connections to larger societal forces: the concealment of the unsightly or unseen, or the building of walls between countries during incipient nationalisms and todays processes of atomisation and sectarianism. For the Biennial, Lidén is presenting three works that refer both to the street and to bourgeois interiors and waiting rooms: Untitled (studyzaun) (2017), Untitled (wartezaun)(2017), and Untitled (liegezaun) (2017). Inflections of the word Zaun– meaning fence in German – they are intended to block viewership as much as to be viewed, waited in, or studied. These works include segments of fences, sourced from urban spaces in Berlin, and placed in the exhibition space, grounded by concrete blocks on each side, temporarily obstructing the view. Incorporating a chaise longue, a reworked item of middle-class furniture, the piece's materials are sourced primarily from the streets of Berlin. While the industrial, zinc-plated steel fence frames portions of the city's street art, allying the work to sites of resistance and commonality, the chair deconstructs a bourgeois emblem and appears uncomfortable and somewhat dysfunctional.

The alliance between a fence, which excludes and divides, and an emblem of cold comfort is intended by the artist as a commentary on an age of increased borders and fence-making – an era in which those with privilege and power have the capacity to contain and restrain, and where safety is falsely equated with exclusion. In this way, Lidén collapses urban and domestic spaces using simple materials that, in their combination and contextualisation, gain weight as symbols of a quietly resistant politics.