“Premium Economy”

TANK Shanghai is pleased to present “Premium Economy”, Swedish artist Anna UddenBerg’s first solo exhibition in Asia.

Premium Economy transforms the armature of transportation infrastructure into sexualized, pseudo-functional sculptures activated by performers. Anna Uddenberg distorts our increasingly automated environment and the mechanisms of viral internet culture into sculptural materiality, staging highly charged scenarios. The works in Premium Economy present the body as an asset to be modified and controlled, surrendering autonomy to user-friendly technologies.

Drawing from the aesthetics of non-places—such as hotel rooms and airports—Uddenberg’s sculptures set the stage for the body to be willfully supported, entrapped, pampered, and ultimately rendered useless, all while remaining on display for public consumption. Making use of industrial design elements that evoke functionality as a means to direct and alter the human body’s physical movement, Uddenberg redirects and dissects this formal language as a way of speaking about conditioned human behavior.

《The Official Escape II》

2023

Polylactic acid, thermoset polymer resin, epoxy, concrete, stainless steel, leather, acrylic windshield, chalk paint, foam boat flooring, glass

159 x 105 x 122.5 cm

Courtesy the artist; Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin.

For this presentation, Uddenberg situates four sculptural works, positioned to mirror airport security checkpoints under a low hangning office ceiling. Defined by its generic, placeless quality, the office-landscape uses artificial lighting to blur the sense of time, erasing the distinction between day and night. Low-tiled ceilings and gray wall-to-wall carpet create a setting that could just as easily exist in Singapore, Reykjavík, or São Paulo—a global template of late capitalist efficiency, designed for flexible hours that often distort the boundaries between work and life. On three customized monitor stands, resembling informational display screens, film sequences from the artist’s ongoing project—shot in New York (US), Mannheim (DE) in 2023 and TANK Shanghai 2025 —are on view, reinforcing the sense of non-placeness. These sequences feature Premium Economy and extend Uddenberg’s exploration of her works as sculptural scripts, where forms guide the viewer’s gaze and suggest how the human body might interact with them. The performers assume positions of authority before scrupulously yielding, ultimately occupying a liminal space between control and capitulation. Uddenberg’s caricature of efficiency reveals the relinquishment of selfhood and the humanization of industrial architecture—through touch screens, organic shapes, and ergonomic design. High-fidelity speakers, installed next to the monitors, emit a custom-composed white noise sound piece.

The title refers to an airplane seat designation that suggests a slight improvement over baseline economy class. The benefits are nominal—an inch of extra legroom, a designated space for one’s bag—yet the body in transit seeks to reclaim authority even as it submits to a controlled environment. Stuck in a feedback loop of user-friendly technology, interface, and industrial design, our behavior contorts as we navigate both physical and digital realms.

Through the feedback loop of consumerist culture, Anna Uddenberg investigates how body culture, spirituality, and self-staging are intertwined with the mediation and production of subjectivity by new technologies and circulation of forms. Her practice integrates approaches to gender while acting as a space for reflecting on taste and class, appropriation and sexuality, pushing these questions into new material territories. Uddenberg’s work continues to confront feminine identity in consumer culture and explores performativity by using sculpture and performance as visual platforms. The use of automobile skeletal structures and other utilitarian structures in her latest abstract and figurative works refers to the concept of comfort zone and proxies for architecture. The ‘furnituresque’ outlook is a result of multiple rearrangements of everyday objects and materials, which are set in a new dialogue with one another.