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Whether bashing a bicycle with a crowbar, performing a ballet/punk-rock dance half dressed on a Stockholm commuter train, or walking naked through a stranger's abandoned apartment, seditious Swede Klara Liden tries to scatter little bits of anarchy across the everyday. Her formal training in architecture led her to scrutinize space for its code of social constraints; her natural inclination to rebel followed with performances that upend such codes. Adding to the fuck-it atmosphere of her videos are shaky handheld camerawork and driving, cacophonic soundtracks by the likes of Legendary Stardust Cowboy. For her sculptures, Liden favors similarly abject apparatuses like cardboard, police barriers, or carpet scraps, some of which you can climb into to perch in an awkward space reminiscent of a Thomas Hirschhorn cave sans philosophy. Her production costs are usually nil, and as with the free, alternative postal system she briefly ran in Stockholm or the underground house she built on the banks of the River Spree, her projects attempt to forge different routes and anarchic systems of existence by the most scrappy, shrugging means.

"Klara Liden" originally appeared in the December 2008 / January 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' December 2008 / January 2009 Table of Contents.