Klara Liden: Square Moon

Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK

From November 26, 2024, to February 15, 2025, Sadie Coles HQ in London hosts Square Moon, a solo exhibition by Klara Liden. The show explores the urban environment’s often-overlooked moments and phenomena, themes of loneliness, and ephemeral disruptions within the cityscape. Klara Liden’s work seems to capture fleeting anomalies—cosmic interruptions in the mundane, sparking a spontaneous desire to share and document the unusual amidst the city’s regular rhythm. Throughout this exhibition, the Swedish artist draws attention to the quiet moments.

“Klara Liden’s work speaks to the loneliness of a glitch in the city. The fox crossing the road. The streetlight erratically flashing. The moon reflected perfectly on the empty advertisement case of a bus shelter. These moments act like comets, tearing through our daily infrastructure, presenting us with a knee-jerk desire to share. To point to the fox. To take a photograph of the moon. To stop and stare at the streetlight. Because when the advertisements are quiet and the signs are empty, we are left to feel what is in between.” (Press release—Calla Henkel, 2024)

In Square Moon, Liden transforms the gallery into a soundscape of mechanical hums emanating from seven tri-vision billboards. These billboards, manipulated to reveal their steely, unadorned surfaces or turned inside out to expose their gray undersides, become canvases, a mirror, or a landscape for projection and interpretation. One billboard features a singular line spray-painted across it—suggestive of Liden’s minimalistic yet powerful intervention into the visual and textual language that dominates public spaces. Visitors encounter a series of video installations showing Liden herself navigating through the city. Clothed in black, she moves through urban environments, captured tightly by the camera so that the surrounding city is only visible in fragments at the edges of the frame. This portrayal emphasizes the individual’s interaction with the urban environment.

Klara Liden prompts a reevaluation of what is often overlooked, suggesting that in the absence of commercial and official narratives, personal and collective agency can thrive. The exhibition invites visitors to reimagine the city as a place of anarchic renewal and endless possibility, encouraging them to reclaim and reinterpret the spaces around them.

For more information, please consult Sadie Coles HQ’s website here.