ANNA UDDENBERG WHITE NOISE EXHIBITION

Anna Uddenberg has an ongoing interest in functionality as an instrument of control which she again picked up and worked with the exhibition White Noise in Telegraph Gallery in Olomouc (22 October 2026 – 4 February 2027). In that work, she takes the enclosed architecture of the contemporary office space as an organizing structure with a compressed administrative interior of suspended ceilings, fluorescent light, partitions, ventilation systems, and Herman Miller office chairs. Uddenberg’s fragmented and increasingly disembodied figures become a victim and an corporeal extension concurrently of the furniture and system that contains them. The body itself loses its autonomy and becomes part of the infrastructure.

The office in White Noise is deliberately generic. Gray wall-to-wall carpet, modular partitions, artificial white light, and standardized furniture produce an environment without obvious geographical or temporal specificity, one that could be reproduced almost anywhere. A lowered ceiling compresses the gallery into a gridded administrative interior, altering the viewer’s physical relation to the space, while the absence of natural light makes the passage of time increasingly difficult to register. Above the ceiling, cables, ventilation, lighting, and technical systems normally kept out of view remain exposed. Even when you haven’t been in a space light this and just know it from movies, the environment is immediately recognizable, yet difficult to locate: familiar enough to require little conscious attention, but sufficiently displaced to produce a persistent sense of unease.

The gallery is divided into H-shaped half transparent panels, providing individual workstations without fully enclosing them, offering the appearance of privacy while preserving the visibility of the larger grid. Each figure occupies its own designated space but remains exposed to the environment surrounding it, giving privacy another spatial condition through which behaviour is organized. As the environment is structured by repetition and self-regulation, the sterile environmental shows the visitor the abstraction of labour.

This contradiction is central to Uddenberg’s engagement with Rem Koolhaas’s concept of Junkspace: an architecture accumulated through systems intended to facilitate contemporary life, yet increasingly detached from the bodies inhabiting it. Junkspace is sealed, hold together not by structure but by skin, like a bubble. The exhibition’s psychological tension lies in the gap between an environment designed to accommodate the body and the conditions to which that body must nevertheless adapt.

Uddenberg’s figures appear suspended within these partitioned spaces, their bodies increasingly difficult to separate from the structures that support them. Reduced to torsos, or pairs of legs, fragmented anatomical forms are stretched across and folded into Herman Miller Aeron chairs, whose mesh surfaces and rigid frames contour the body while remaining almost transparent around it. Designed to adapt to the individual body, the Aeron appears here to produce the opposite relation.

White noise is a sound which we do not recognize and unobservant loose attention for. Responding to the existing sounds of the building, its ambient frequencies—the hum of ventilation, electrical systems, and fluorescent lighting—are amplified and synthesized until the sound becomes almost indistinguishable from the infrastructure surrounding it. It has no obvious relation to an exterior world, belonging instead to an interior engineered to maintain its own continuous atmosphere. White noise occupies a peculiar threshold of perception: continuously present yet capable of receding from conscious awareness.

Administrative logic emerges in White Noise as a low-level, continuous form of aggression, dispersed throughout the environment rather than exercised by any singular authority. Nothing in the space appears overtly hostile. Its light, furniture, partitions, and sound all ostensibly exist to make the body more comfortable, productive, private, and autonomous. Yet every solution requires another adjustment, another support, another system through which the body must learn to adapt. Like the white noise itself, these conditions exert their pressure most effectively when they cease to be consciously perceived.