Who owns public spaces? If you ask KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the answer is unequivocal: the artist Klara Lidén. As the title of one of her earliest 2005 self-portraits declares, she holds the “Keys to the City”. In the photograph, Lidén conspiratorially opens her trench coat in a playful black-market pose. Lining the inside are bolt cutters, pliers, and wrenches — the tools with which she uses to unlock cities to this day. Equipped as such, she launched her campaign of conquest from the streets of Stockholm, New York, and Berlin into galleries and museums around the world. The urban space remains both Lidén’s stage and her material depot. Her sculptures, performances, photographs, and video works emerge directly on sidewalks, in trains, underpasses, and parks. In doing so, she disrupts the anonymity and cosmopolitan codes of conduct in big cities. By exploring urban centers out to their margins and beyond the barriers, she reveals that even in places promising the greatest freedoms, boundaries and power hierarchies persist. Thanks to KW, the city she has called home for the past twenty years is finally dedicating its first institutional solo exhibition to her. Spanning three floors, the retrospective brings together subversive works from the past two decades. Often disorienting, yet always humorous, Lidén embarks on a reclamation of urban space. Drawing on her background in architecture, she refers to this practice as “Unbuilding” — a strategy that can take many forms: at times she performs, as in “Paralyzed” from the early 2000s, a pole-dance routine for commuters on the S-Bahn. At others, she dismantles trash bins and advertising boards from pedestrian zones and reassembles them as readymades in the white cube.
Lidén’s practice borrows from the improvised street aesthetics of punk and graffiti, while casually drawing on intellectual heavyweights such as Guy Debord, Marcel Duchamp, and the Affichistes. At a time when anonymous investors are buying up inner cities and allowing them to decay into ghost blocks, she tirelessly fights for what makes metropolises truly unique and livable at their core: their open spaces. Working with found materials from public space, too, is the Congolese artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi. The trained electrician spent last autumn as an artist-in-residence at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Using discarded items from the KW’s storage and materials sourced from Berlin recycling centers, he transformed scrap into playful sculptures that have shed any trace of their original functionality. His imaginative constructions can be read as metaphors for inequality in his homeland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Translating an entire urban landscape — with all its hierarchies — into sound was the achievement of Else Marie Pade. KW dedicates a sensitive audio exhibition to the Danish composer, techno pioneer, and resistance fighter: ten of her most significant musical arrangements, alongside works on paper, introduce the Musique concrète pioneer, who passed away in 2016, to a wider public for the first time. Her “Symphonie magnétophonique” evokes 24 hours in Copenhagen through an intricate sonic tableau. If Klara Lidén is the keeper of the city’s keys, then Else Marie Pade was the guardian of its urban sound. Both shared a clear message: ultimately, urban space belongs not to the powerful, but to the people.
Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: David von Becker, Frank Sperling
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststr.69, 10117 Berlin-Mitte; map
Klara Lidén: Kunstwerke until 10.05.2026
Jean Katambayi Mukendi: Ratio until 10.05.2026
Else Marie Pade: Partitur until 10.05.2026
@kwinstituteofcontemporaryart
