Anna Uddenberg: Premium Economy

Every three years, the Kunsthalle Mannheim and the Hector Stiftungen award the Hector Art Prize to international, contemporary artists or collectives. With the Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg, the jury in 2022 opted for a powerful feminist position. Uddenberg was born in 1982 and today lives and works in Berlin and Stockholm. Uddenberg’s artistic work presents a thrilling, challenging but also polarizing view of corporeality, sex (or gender) and commodity aesthetics. In her figurative and recent abstract works, Uddenberg explores gender performativity and supposedly authentic selfimages in the age of social media platforms.

The exhibition shows several sculptures, which mostly were created especially for the exhibition. Uddenberg had the exhibition space altered for the show: An ordinary office ceiling hovers at half height and the windows are covered with off-the-shelf venetian blinds. The result is a strangely nondescript space that recalls places of transit – be it a hospital waiting room or the check-in area of an airport. Inside are eight new sculptures combining what seem to be familiar, industrially produced materials with peculiar futuristic shapes. We see steps that mentally invite us to climb them, belts we are acquainted with from aircraft seats and recesses into which human bodies could seemingly fit.

The title of the exhibition evokes associations with modern airline seats, with the word “Premium” suggesting a particularly valuable experience that is, however, counteracted by the second term “Economy” which implicitly alludes to the millimeter-precise, spatial optimization of an airplane cabin. In this way, the artist uses the contradiction of terms as a metaphor for how, in capitalist society, our bodies seem to be effortlessly forced into postures, shapes and modes of being.