Remember in Reservoir Dogs when Mr. Blonde—played by the unruly Michael Madsen—mutilated the bound and gagged police officer to the beat of Stealers Wheel’s bubblegum hit “Stuck in the Middle with You”? “Losing control, yeah, I’m all over the place, clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right; here I am, stuck in the middle with you.” Klara Lidén does her own Mr. Blonde in Bodies of Society, 2006, a video in her exhibition “Unheimlich Manöver.” To an original score Lidén commissioned from the Swedish band Tvillingarna, jingly like carny music, she prances her own âme damnée dance and then,

There are twenty-four Truth Commissions in business around the world today. Undertaken by new political regimes that follow dictatorships guilty of systematic violations of human rights, they usually have no capacity to prosecute miscreants. They are great pretenders, playing their part in “regimes of truth,” where claims for an unambiguous version of reality are established, if not acted on. In her midcareer retrospective, “Fiction Is No Joke,” spanning more than a decade, Sophie Tottie serenely eviscerated truth systems, including her own, with the double edge of relativism, leaving it to us