The ‘Junger Ankauf’ initiative is especially pleased to have received an additional donation from the artist who dedicated her work Unitled (Bench) of 2011 to Museum Ludwig.

Untitled (Toujours Être Ailleurs), 2011
The nocturnal urban scene in the video work Untitled (Toujours Être Ailleurs) presents an empty car park in whose centre a dark lamppost towers up. The projection could be taken for a still, if it were not for the occasional slightly flickering illumination of the adjacent industrial building and the headlights of individual cars passing by in the background. Once the viewer’s eyes have adjusted to the darkness, an indefinable movement around the only partly visible lamppost in the centre of the image becomes discernible. It is a pale hand moving downwards and only then reveals a hooded figure dressed entirely in black, clinging on to the lamppost with its arms and legs and slowly sliding down it. The performer is Klara Lidén herself. With a minimal gesture and considerable physical exertion, she renders a movement visible in its stages through that slow glide. The bracketed title Toujours Être Ailleurs – literally To always be elsewhere – is a metaphor for Klara Lidén’s dislocations: the way she shifts actions from public to private space, occupies urban space and evokes mental defamiliarisation.

Text: Lilian Haberer, from the publication “Junger Ankauf”, Cologne 2012