Every three years, the Kunsthalle Mannheim and the Hector Stiftungen award the Hector-Prize to international, contemporary artists or collectives. With the Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg, the jury in 2022 opted for a powerful feminist position.
Uddenberg’s artistic work presents a thrilling, challenging but also polarizing view of corporeality, sex (or gender) and commodity aesthetics. Through her use of car body structures and other objects of utility in her most recent abstract and figurative pieces, Uddenberg explores gender performativity by employing sculpture and performance as visual signs.
Ten sculptures are on display in the Kunsthalle, five of which were created specifically for the show. In her artistic dealing with the medium of sculpture, Uddenberg continues to develop her own formal language using the 3D printing process, creating a powerful composition that is brought to a unity by the exciting exhibition architecture. The peculiarly shaped bodies draped over suitcases or pieces of furniture—which garnered the artist international acclaim—have made way for a series of devices that appear even stranger. Instead of showing the objectification of the human body in the hyper-mediatized world of today, the artist now presents objects that could form the poses of the bodies in her earlier works.
Curators: Johan Holten and Pia Goebel (curatorial assistance)
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