Continental Breakfast by Anna Uddenberg (2023) From the offical press release; “Pulling from the aesthetics of airline seats, hospital architecture and hotel design, the sculptures express a hyper-functionality inaccessible to human use. Uddenberg’s work materializes at the eroding boundary between object and human. The modification of bodies through digital and medical procedures and the humanization of industrial design through touch screens, organic shapes and ergonomic design come crashing together in Uddenberg’s work. Continental Breakfast expands on Uddenberg’s fascination with functionality as a mode of control. In the effort to make life efficient, we ultimately change our conception of selfhood on the rhythmic dopamine drip of updates, notifications, and information excess. The title refers to free breakfast offered at hotels, a replica of the light morning meals common throughout the European continent. A simulacra of breakfast offered to the body in transit. Seemingly a luxury, aspirational values are projected onto cheap, mediocre food. Similar to an airplane meal, the body in transit seeks to rectify its authority as it submits to a controlled environment. The hotel, a single domino in the chain of events in cities increasingly inhospitable to everyone but the ultra-wealthy. Uddenberg translates symbolic values of real-estate textures, ‘skins’, veneer and the sheen of steel crowd control blockades into sculptural materiality. These quasi-functional objects of financial domination provide the stage on which performers surrender their bodily autonomy. Stuck in a feedback loop of ‘user-friendly’ technology, interface and industrial design our behavior contorts in the navigation of both physical and digital realms.” #fyp #art #artist #photography #performance #arttok