Anna Uddenberg

Anna Uddenberg (b. 1982, Stockholm, Sweden) is a sculptor and installation artist based in Berlin. Her work probes the entangled relationships between consumerist culture, body politics, gender performance, and late-capitalist subjectivity. Drawing from architecture, mobility, BDSM, and the aesthetics of self-optimization, Uddenberg creates hybrid sculptural forms that blur the lines between furniture, prosthesis, and human posture—what she calls "furnituresque" objects.

Her practice explores the pressures exerted on identity and embodiment by consumer technologies and digital self-staging. Referencing utilitarian structures such as airport furnishings, gym equipment, and automotive frameworks, her sculptural installations serve as physical metaphors for submission, conformity, and the distortion of agency in neoliberal systems. Often activated through performance, her works dramatize the contradictory forces of empowerment and control that shape contemporary life—especially as they relate to femininity, taste, and class.

In major projects such as Premium Economy at Kunsthalle Mannheim and FAKE ESTATE at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Uddenberg constructs immersive environments that mimic transactional architectures—from airport queues to real estate mock-ups—revealing the theatrical, coercive, and fetishistic undercurrents embedded in mundane infrastructures. These works challenge the viewer to consider how the logic of zoning, design, and mobility shape both psychological and physical submission.

Her sculptures are typically fabricated with industrial materials and 3D printing techniques, finished in slick synthetic veneers that echo the seductive yet disorienting language of lifestyle branding and urban planning. Referencing both performance art and critical design, Uddenberg's objects exist in a state of suspended function, tools for rituals that seem at once seductive and absurd.

Portrait shot by Valeria Herklotz