“Techno Battle” is a rare collaborative video by Hanna and Klara Lidén, Swedish artists and sisters, who each have a solo show opening next week at Maccarone gallery (Hanna) and at the New Museum (Klara). In this ritualistic early work, the two young women—one wearing what looks like a fencing uniform, and the other in a ghoulish mask, T-shirt, and jeans—face off and hurl bits of technology at each other, like a laptop computer, which shatters, and whose broken fragments they then stuff into a bonfire.
With its echoes of ancient Norse mythology and contemporary angst, the video is curiously unnerving, yet its themes are typical of the work of the two sisters, who, independently of each other and in different media, have been quietly taking the art world by storm. They grew up in suburban Stockholm, their mother a doctor, their father a biologist. Hanna, now 36, escaped first to London, and then to New York, where she studied at Parsons and made her name as a photographer, taking pictures of uncannily masked, often naked figures in pastoral landscapes reminiscent of her native land. Klara, three years younger, stayed behind for a while, studying architecture and creating works—videos, performances, and architectural interventions—that suggest a parallel universe of inner-city slackers going mad and getting by. She now divides her time between Berlin and New York.
Both sisters draw from the urban street theater surrounding them. “I’ve been here for almost fifteen years now,” says Hanna, on the phone from her home in Chelsea. “I walk or bike every day between my apartment on Seventh Avenue and my studio in Chinatown, and everything comes from that journey.” In the past, she’s created sculptures by filling plastic bags with cement and piling them one upon the other. Her new show includes a series of ready-mades—leather jackets wrapped around human-size pedestals, like a little army of young artists with attitude—and photographs of flowers she bought at the corner deli, spray-painted black in a nod to the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s singular elegance.
Klara Lidén’s show at the New Museum—one of five simultaneous, full-floor exhibitions devoted to women artists—will feature videos such as Paralyzed (2003), in which she performs an acrobatic striptease/dance before surprised commuters on a Stockholm train. The show will also include a series of works she made from advertising posters she stole from the street, folded and painted white, as well as two of her poetic architectural interventions, like the one she created when she closed off part of the Reena Spaulings Fine Art gallery in New York, opening the pristine space to pigeons from the street.
Despite their works’ gritty tone, the sisters’ relationship appears incredibly wholesome. “We were so close growing up, and she’s still my best friend,” Hanna says. “We’re involved in each other’s practices, and we speak almost every day. We shared a feeling of being outsiders in the environment we grew up in. We were like a unit in that.”
“Hanna Lidén: Ghost Town,” opens May 2 and is on view through June 16 at Maccarone gallery, 630 Greenwich Street, NYC; maccarone.net; “Klara Lidén: Bodies of Society” opens May 6 and is on view through July 1 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery; newmuseum.org