Power Dynamics in the Art World

We meet Berlin-based Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg to explore HOME WRECKERS, her first UK solo exhibition, at The Perimeter. Working primarily in sculpture, installation and performance, Anna Uddenberg’s practice reflects on taste and class, appropriation and sexuality, and explores systemised relations of power and conventions of control in the context of a technology-bound consumer culture.

At The Perimeter, Anna Uddenberg presents works made over the past seven years, featuring 10 sculptures of hypersexualised and overextended faceless female figures. The sculptures featured in HOME WRECKERS point at the absurdity in the sexualisation of the female form in advertisements for domestic items such as sofas, prams and even for laundry detergent. Uddenberg has created a range of generic interior environments as a setting for these sculptures, transforming The Perimeter with soft furnishings such as sofas and carpets to further emphasise the staged associations of femininity and domesticity. These staged domestic environments which could be found in homes, hotels, on reality TV sets or in furniture showrooms, feel both accessible and familiar. They evoke specific notions of expected behaviours, assigning a performative value to the acts undertaken therein. 

Alongside these sculptures, Uddenberg presents her first ever film at The Perimeter, co-directed with Thyago Sainte. This film also marks The Perimeter’s first time supporting the production of a new commission, which will go on to be shown internationally. The work has been made possible with the additional support of Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. 

Uddenberg has reached art world, fashion and Internet notoriety with her practice. Three sculptures featured at The Perimeter were originally produced for a Balenciaga advertising campaign for its Balenciaga Crocs collaboration in 2021. Uddenberg most recently received a viral response to a performance piece, ‘Continental Breakfast’ staged at Meredith Rosen Gallery in April 2023. Provoking a strong and ‘real' reaction in the digital space opens up Uddenberg’s practice, as she has long desired for her work to transcend representation, stating, “Instead of representing something, I want to trigger something so that it becomes real in a way.” As the lines between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Uddenberg postulates that “Maybe the fake is more authentic than whatever you think of as authentic”. 

Concurrently with her exhibition at The Perimeter, Anna Uddenberg is staging an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in celebration of her being awarded the Hector Art Prize in 2022. In recognition of the conversation between these exhibitions, The Perimeter has co-published a catalogue with the Kunsthalle Mannheim, which documents the breadth of Anna Uddenberg’s practice to date.

Anna Uddenberg was born in Stockholm in 1982 and today lives and works in Berlin and Stockholm. She studied at Frankfurt Städelschule and Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

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Follow @Filet_Minion_Thong on Instagram and visit @ThePerimeterLondon & @KunsthalleMa. Exhibition is free to visit and runs until 22nd December 2023.

💝 Thanks Alex V. Petalas, @MeredithRosenGallery & @KraupaTuskanyZeidler

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