If you get caught smoking as a kid, the best punishment is to be locked in a closet and forced to smoke a whole pack. It’ll put you off for life. Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg is taking that same approach, not for ciggies, but for rampant over-sexualisation and intense female objectification. She’s shoving it so brutally in your face that you might never find anything sexy ever again.
She’s become TikTok famous lately for ‘Continental Breakfast’, a series of interactive sculptures that force performers into positions of extreme physical vulnerability, futuristic dentist chairs for sex dungeons, leaving you legs splayed, face down, ass up; that’s the way she likes to make discomfiting sculptural installations.
Here at The Perimeter, the sculptures are almost all of human figures. From the window outside you spot a woman bent double, waving a selfie stick trying to take a picture of her own genitals; as you walk in, a pregnant figure in bondage is tending to a pushchair covered in black zips. Upstairs, more bondage, more twisting, more splaying. The figures wear Balenciaga crocs, bondage gear sewn together out of fake handbags; their bodies are folded in half, heads between legs, contorted in metal contraptions, or spread out over a table, digging their nails into thick carpet.
I think the chairs of ‘Continental Breakfast’ are probably better individual sculptures, but the works here are still brilliant. It all sits somewhere between HR Giger horror porn, luxury luggage and hand-knit craft aesthetics. But it’s pushed so far that none of it is alluring or sexual. Instead, it’s cold, clinical, somehow repulsive. It’s sexuality and exploitation made so artificial, so grotesque, that it turns the stomach, makes you feel vile, gross, complicit.
This is art about female identity as a consumable commodity, art about submission to technology, submission to capitalism, submission to power. And in all its intentionally gross hyper-sexuality, it’s a rejection of that submission that will leave you feeling firmly spanked, and not in a good way.
