Cortney Lane Stell: Can you tell us about your chief interests and the threads that connect various elements of your practice? I read an article a while ago about how you create this palette of triggers, combining objects, materials, shapes, or forms that are socially coded, and that we're somehow familiar with.

Anna Uddenberg: My practice started from an interest in performativity, how performativity overlaps with consumer culture at large, and, now in recent years, how this is all propelled by social media platforms and algorithms. I’m interested in collecting bits and pieces from the constant stream of imagery coming our way, trying to boil these down into an average or set of signifiers. But I think it's also important to say that my practice is still interested in materials. While some of the topics I approach can sound quite theoretical, my goal is to translate everything into a very material practice.

CLS: Early on in your career, you maintained a performance practice, which then morphed into more furniture-like sculptures that are suggestive of the body. More recently, these sculptures have become performative again, in the sense of being used for exhibition performances. Your recent film, Useless Sacrifice, is a natural growth of this trajectory, set in three exhibitions: Fake Estate at Schinkel Pavillon (Berlin), Continental Breakfast at Meredith Rosen Gallery (NYC), and Premium Economy at Kunstalle Mannheim. Can you tell us about your sculptural practice of performance and how it developed into what it is now?

AU: I started out as a performer and later started making figurative works intended to replace me as a performer. My sculptures are composed of different quasi-functional objects that look or pretend to be useful somehow, but it's questionable if they actually are. I thought this was an interesting starting point to direct viewers toward imagining how these sculptures could potentially be interacted with.

From there, I became interested in seeing what happens when we expand from this sculptural practice into film. I didn't have a script to start with, as I relied completely on the set as a kind of script. From there, we let the story unfold across each gallery space, recording scene by scene.

CLS: What does it feel like to turn your sculptures into props? Is that sacrilege in some way, in sculpture? What does it do to them?

AU: I think it's actually sort of liberating not to be so heavy about it. I had to just see whatever worked best for the sake of the film. I believe in a way of world building that thinks of the characters and the sculptures as one. I can't really imagine the characters as separate from their environment; they are what they are because they’re in this environment. So in that sense, the sculptures really played an essential part of the driving visual force.

CLS: Absolutely. Let's talk more about the sculptures in Fake Estate, because they're so suggestive of multiple things, like large bassinets or strollers. Can you tell me some of the references that you were thinking about?

AU: These sculptures came out of a show that I did before Fake Estate, which was called Big Baby. The exhibition involved 10 oversized pacifiers with reliefs of muscular men entrapped or pampered or embedded in various structures. These structures take after baby carriers, but also have some elements from marine vessels, like a spoiler from a racing boat. I wanted everything to look a bit inflated and soft, but also with an emphasis on security, with belts and straps. These models later turned into larger, physical sculptures.

CLS: When the performers climb into the Fake Estate sculptures in Useless Sacrifice, the more hyper-sexualized sort of forms that you're known for become evident. There’s this line between something that's caressing and swaddling the performers, while also positioning and strapping them in for some sort of, say, BDSM situation.

AU: It's interesting how something that's considered safe, like car interiors or baby equipment, can also entrap. I'm curious about the line between what’s considered normal and what’s not, because for me, what's normal are usually the weirdest things. When normality is performed seamlessly and ‘correctly,’ it feels effortless. But once you start to sense a certain type of effort behind it, that's when you can see the flaw in the matrix.

I'm curious about where those lines are; for example, at what age it stops being okay to be  ‘cute.’ There are all kinds of invisible boundaries and social agreements happening on autopilot every day. My interest in BDSM comes from this contractual lens, investigating the impact of social contracts on behavioral role playing and seeing where these boundaries are. And how this could all be manifested in, say, an adult baby.

CLS: We see those contracts in a similar yet completely different way with the lunch break that happens during the second half of Useless Sacrifice. The performers exude a very different sense of power. They're very austere and professional in their behavior, like a flight attendant. It's interesting to see a different body type engage your sculptures and to see the power structure change. Did it change for you as well? Are these women empowered or are they just performing a higher task?

AU: I would say that they fulfill the whole spectrum of tasks. The performance you see in Useless Sacrifice initially took place during an opening at Meredith Rosen Gallery, which had a public audience. The performers, acting as service personnel, directed viewers onto either side of a red stanchion, in a strict and authoritarian manner. People were divided into different sections of the gallery. Once the audience was put in place, the performers climbed into the sculptures and locked themselves in.

In a way, their performance was about self-bondage while also controlling others. And then it was  about endurance, with everyone just sort of waiting it out. At one point, the performers dismissed the crowd and had them leave the gallery. I don't know if I would use the word empowering, per se, but I am curious about approaching different power dynamics from an ambivalent perspective. Maybe there's a joy in being in a position not necessarily viewed as the most powerful.

CLS: While I've seen some folks align your sculpture with third wave feminism, to me it's not so clear that the women in your projects are being empowered through their sexuality like a lot of third wave feminist thinkers celebrate. And so it's really interesting to hear this complexity in relation to your performers—how they move, how they dress themselves, and how they behave. You're creating situations that are somehow familiar, but in a pluralistic way so they can't be pigeonholed. Do you see yourself as a feminist or any sort of activist in relationship to your practice? Are you critical of the performativity that you feel is common in our society?

AU: I've been a feminist since I was a teenager; I’ve needed to be one in order to navigate the world. I'm quite clear about the political issues I believe in.

But in my practice, the topics I focus on are not always so clear, because I'm interested in things that pertain to mass culture. There are parts of mass culture that are deeply problematic, but then there's also something very entertaining about it. There are things we love that are also grotesque. It would be easy to create a long list of why social media is so horrible and bad for us, but there are layers beyond this view.

What I'm trying to do as an artist is record my own experience and channel it, even if that experience is very unpleasant or something that I'm attracted to at the same time. The best-case scenario is if an artwork can communicate all these layers.