Review: Sidsel Meineche Hansen: Getting Over Uber by Adam Kleinman, Frieze (2018)

Fifty years on from the uprisings of May 1968, Sidsel Meineche Hansen has deftly branded their exhibition, ‘OVER’, with an icon that would make the situationists gleam. The artist has hijacked the logo of the car service Uber, superimposing it with a swastika and a red strike-through band to denote a negation. On both a linguistic and visual level, this move slides signifiers. Über, which translates to ‘above’, is inexorably linked to the Nazi’s use of the term to imply German racial supremacy: ‘Deutschland über alles’ (Germany, above all else), while today ‘uberization’ has become a term of art signifying disruptive innovations within the service industry. And yet, several years on from these cyber-economic revolutions, the tech industry – and notably Uber – is facing increasing flak for simply replacing one set of robber barons with another, replete with accelerated forms of disenfranchisement not limited to economy. Hansen, likewise, puns ‘above’ with its near-synonym ‘over’ as a call to arms to end such structures before they become endemic to daily life. The artist turns these means against themselves by presenting viewers with an app to tour the exhibition.

Full text at Frieze here.