It’s a Friday night on the cusp of London’s Frieze week as crowds descend to celebrate Home Wreckers, The Perimeter’s latest, highly-anticipated exhibition by the artist Anna Uddenberg. As people swirl and smoke along a queue that trails off beyond the gallery’s entrance, the front window glows with the ghostly pallor of a sculpted figure crouched over a piece of terrace furniture. Faceless behind a glossy screen of auburn hair, the figure is prostrate before the extended limb of their own selfie stick – hovering above like a sword of Damocles re-made in the metaverse. A white smartphone sits supreme, primed to capture this body’s contortions. As our eyes attune to the figure’s engulfing athleisure, butterfly ‘tramp stamp’, and Crocs, it is as if an AI-generated @influencersinthewild has been brought to life, somewhere between monster, mutant, and model/influencer. This sculpture, Journey of Self Discovery (2016), is one of ten such figures featured in the exhibition, which brings together various works created by the Berlin-based Swedish artist over the past seven years.
Home Wreckers opens in tandem with a solo show at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, which follows the artist being awarded the Hector Art Prize in 2022 and is accompanied by a co-published catalogue documenting Anna’s practice to date. In that time, Anna has achieved both notoriety and acclaim – not only in the art world but across fashion and social media. On TikTok, footage from her performance piece Continental Breakfast (staged at Meredith Rosen Gallery in April of this year) has over 100 million combined views and counting. Meanwhile, sprawled out on the basement floor of The Perimeter’s archive is one of three works created as part of a collaboration with Balenciaga: a lunging figure with piercings and platform Crocs, entitled “CORPORATE GRAY / External Spine (2021)”. That the artist is so attuned to capturing the viral momentum of meme culture, warping the aesthetic zeitgeist into the uncanny valley of her practice, chimes with Anna’s long-time interest in “commodification of the self, and trying to turn yourself into some sort of product.”
Anna’s work considers the “feedback loop” of contemporary consumer culture as mediated through the dizzying visual landscapes of our tech-addicted and dopamine-depleted age. One of The Perimeter’s galleries is turned over into a viewing room for Anna’s first film – a new work co-directed with Thyago Sainte. This incorporates many of the familiar elements from Anna’s performance work: cool absurdist structures that activate (or are activated by) the body to ask questions about power and control, agency, and aspiration culture. As the works take on a virality of their own, it serves to complete the feedback loop that Anna’s work investigates – a sort of cyber full-circle that both expands and elevates her investigation of our online co-dependencies and algorithmic aesthetic codes. The effect is often unsettling, luring the viewer in with a collage of familiar references and digital hallmarks – only to find them displaced, recoded, and frequently inverted across the slick surface of the work’s exterior.
On the ground floor of The Perimeter, a figure – “Tanya (2021)” – crouches just beyond the front door. Appearing as a pregnant mother rifling through her pram in acid green stiletto-Crocs, the figure wears a body suit of scarlet check and body armour bedecked with leather fastenings and a chunky zipper that extends past its spine like a cyberpunk tail. Like many of Anna’s figures, it has a full set of acrylics. In recent years, the artist has begun working with 3D-printing elements of the sculptures – expanding on years of laboriously casting in clay and fibreglass aqua resin.
Though meticulously assembled, the artist describes the production as “very much an improvisational process [..] I maybe know a bit about the pose I want to go for, but then I gather a bunch of materials and sort of try to sketch it out straight onto the work.” Anna sources much of the sculpture’s exterior material from utility stores and clothing outlets, name-checking Decathlon and the Dong Xuan Center – a wholesale market hub in the suburbs of Berlin. The artist is drawn to “things that want to look functional” and a desire to “displace whatever this function is.” Recalling one bulk buy of fake designer handbags, she explains that “because it’s been faked so many times – over and over – it’s like, what is it even imitating anymore? [It becomes] like a mutant with its own sort of life.”
As Jean Baudrillard outlined in the four stages of his philosophical text Simulacra and Simulation (1981) – since frequently memed along the lines of “what you bought online vs when it arrives” – by stage four of the simulation process, “the sign (image or representation) bears no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.” This notion of simulacrum – simulation to the point of the absurd or even grotesque – underpins Anna’s practice and the warped aesthetic coding of her figures. As we grapple with the potential outcomes and aesthetics of AI, there is something especially prescient about Anna’s practice and the way in which the artist remixes references. It is a process of synthesising various inputs – replicating and repeating, (de)constructing and undoing – so as to generate results that are both strangely familiar and not of this world. Even the artist herself has “sort of mixed feelings towards my own work […] I can feel attracted, but also sort of scared.”
On The Perimeter’s first floor, the space is transformed in shades of pale blue and soft carpet. Three figures stand and recline in different poses, with furniture that could be plucked from a Y2K music video or even early iterations of the Big Brother house. One disappears almost head-first into a metallic bar stool, whilst another – “Disconnect (airplane mode)”, from 2018 – is posed atop a plastic recliner with a neon LED fireplace built-in. Anna often draws references by capturing and merging “fragments of the feed” online; “maybe you get like a selfie or something [..] you would see a little bit of hair or some parts of the butt, and then some tiles.” The result is a smorgasbord of visual triggers and “different textures” that she translates into the material of her sculptures. “What I’m trying to do is rip out these fragments and put them together in the works.”
Anna’s work feels genuinely of its time – repurposing and repacking our (virtual) reality to explore issues of labour, class, gender, and the increasingly fraught dynamics of our attention economies. At the top of the building, a singular figure in leather harnessing stands at the end of a tabletop covered with pastel pink faux fur. Long trails in the plushy surface mark the tracks of perfectly manicured talons clawing their way. The tableau is a collision of hyper-sexuality and ominous confrontation. Could this be the home wrecker of the exhibition’s title in their final form? A mutant mistress marking their territory on the building’s penthouse floor? Anna explains her interest in “when the feminine goes a bit out of control [..] when something tips over. I think there’s a sense of agency in that moment when you sort of break character, and that’s when the mutant steps in. Like a glitch in the matrix.” Following months of discourse on the billion-dollar #Barbiecore movement, there is something redemptive in the dark humour and unsettling assemblage of this particular dollhouse.
