In Anna Uddenberg's Office, the Chair Holds the Body Upside Down

Telegraph Gallery Opens White Noise, an Office Installation, in Olomouc

An office chair is supposed to support the body. In Anna Uddenberg's White Noise, it does something rather different. Figures in tights and heels fold over Herman Miller chairs, their heads hanging down where a backrest ought to be. 

Fluorescent lights, grey carpets and office partitions complete a workplace where comfort has taken a strange turn.

At Telegraph Gallery in Olomouc, Anna Uddenberg has turned the familiar office into something considerably less reassuring. Curated by Samuel Staples, White Noise is the Berlin-based artist's first solo exhibition in the Czech Republic, on view until 4 February 2027.

A suspended ceiling with fluorescent panels covers an island of grey carpet, and low partitions with ribbed translucent upper panels divide it into workstations.

In several of them a figure in tights and heels, with long hair hanging down, is folded over a Herman Miller chair, often upside down, with the body where the backrest should be.

Above the ceiling, the building's dark structure and its hanging cables stay in view. According to the gallery's exhibition page, the installation also includes a new sound work that amplifies and synthesizes the building's own ambient frequencies.

The office is the latest in a series of settings where Uddenberg tests how furniture instructs the body. Premium Economy (Kunsthalle Mannheim, 2023) staged the airline seat and the airport queue, with crowd-control stanchions and forms that resemble ergonomic training equipment.

Anna Uddenberg: White Noise — Olomouc - Catapult Contemporary

Explore Anna Uddenberg's White Noise at Telegraph Gallery in Olomouc, where office furniture, corporate control and bodily autonomy intersect.

Catapult ContemporaryDominique Catherina Foertig

Her own term for such objects is quasi-functionality: they look usable, but what they actually do is shape behaviour. In the airport and the lounge, the discipline hides behind a promise of comfort and self-improvement.

In White Noise that alibi is gone. The ergonomic chair belongs to working life, and Uddenberg lets the body take the place where the backrest should be.

Curatorial Statement, Courtesy of Telegraph Gallery

White Noise takes the enclosed architecture of the contemporary office as an organizing structure. In doing so it develops Anna Uddenberg's long-standing interest in functionality as a tool of control.

At Telegraph Gallery the exhibition turns into a Koolhaasian Junkspace: a condensed administrative interior with suspended ceilings, fluorescent light, partitions, ventilation systems and Herman Miller office chairs. The ergonomic promises of comfort, efficiency and practicality take on a psychological dimension here.

Anna Uddenberg's fragmentary and increasingly disembodied figures lose their bodily autonomy and fuse with the furniture and systems that surround them. The body itself thus becomes part of the infrastructure.

For the Czech art scene, the exhibition White Noise is a landmark event. Although Anna Uddenberg's sculptural work has already found its place in leading Czech private collections and in selected group exhibitions, Telegraph Gallery in Olomouc offers Czech and Central European audiences, for the first time, the chance to confront a coherent solo project by this Swedish artist.

About the artist: Anna Uddenberg, originally born in Stockholm, lives and works in Berlin. She is among the most prominent figures of the contemporary international art scene. In her practice she examines how body culture, self-stylisation and spirituality are connected with new technologies and the circulation of forms in consumer society.