Anna Uddenberg's 'White Noise' Turns a Czech Gallery Into an Office

Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg, who works in Berlin, has transformed a gallery in Olomouc, Czechia, into a functioning-looking office. Her solo show 'White Noise' opens October 22 at Telegraph Gallery and runs through February 4, 2027, marking her first solo exhibition in the Czech Republic.

Curated by Samuel Staples, the show places sculptures that fuse Herman Miller ergonomic chairs with fragments of the human body under rectangular ceiling lights, inside a space marked by red access-control lines on a gray floor.

When Furniture Holds the Body

Uddenberg has long explored the relationship between the body, consumer culture, technology and furniture. Here she builds a modern workplace from ergonomic chairs, desks, partitions, fluorescent lights and ventilation, then adds figures that blur the line between person and object. It is hard to tell whether the chair is supporting the body or the body has become a part of the chair.

Ergonomic design carries a quiet paradox: a chair is shaped around the human form, yet it also assumes a particular posture and way of sitting. The sculptures push that idea to an extreme, with joints and torsos fixed in place. The target is less a specific brand than the idea of a work environment engineered for comfort and productivity.

The venue adds another layer. Telegraph Gallery is a converted factory that once produced telephone and telegraph equipment, with its reinforced-concrete structure retained. Where factory machines once dictated workers' movements, today's desks and chairs shape office posture, so two eras of labor overlap. The layout also echoes Rem Koolhaas's concept of 'Junkspace,' his critique of repetitive, function-driven interiors.

Uddenberg's earlier work, including 'Continental Breakfast' at Meredith Rosen Gallery in New York in 2023, used performers who fixed their bodies to sculptures. In 'White Noise,' that tension moves into the furniture itself.

The show does not claim that ergonomic furniture harms health or that every office fixture controls workers. It invites visitors to consider how everyday objects of comfort receive the body, and how far we adjust ourselves to them.

Why It Matters

By turning a familiar office into an unsettling gallery, 'White Noise' makes visible the design logic we rarely notice in daily work life. It is a timely example of contemporary art using whole environments to question comfort, efficiency and bodily autonomy.

Read the original article in Korean: K trendy NEWS