Mia Dudek

Mia Dudek is a Polish artist,  working between London, Lisbon and Warsaw. Dudek graduated from the London College of Communication in 2012 and in 2016 completed her MA at the Royal College of Art, London, as a recipient of a Leverhulme Scholarship Award for her distinctive portfolio.  In 2019 she began PhD in Sculpture at the University if Lisbon Faculty of Belas Artes.

Dudek's work has been featured in a number of exhibitions around Europe as well as in publications, including Source Magazine, LYNX Contemporary and 24 Artists to Watch by Modern Painters, December 2014. In 2018 she has received the Special Jury Anamorphosis Prize for her self-published book MDAM, which is now in MoMA Library Collection in New York.  In May 2019 Art Forum has featured in Critic's Pick her Marsyas show in Galerist, Istanbul curated by Nick Hackworth.

The main focus of Mia Dudek's work is addressing the legacy of brutalist architecture and its relationship to the body, investigating notions of displacement and 'organ habitation'.The work asks: Can a dwelling considered to be a body with skin and entrails? Is the body a form of erotic architecture? The artist investigates the notion of broken physicality between individuals and represents the abstracted, fragmented body, detaching and reformalising it into new structures. Restrictive environments are inescapable but also contain otherwise formless and fluid bodies that threaten to spill over the borders of inanimate structures.

The veins in Mia Dudek's depicted models' skin conjure a sense of fragility and allude to a translucent and corporeal surface that has sensitivity to touch. She confronts not only her photographic works but also viewers with works like Body Recasts, a large concrete structures through which Dudek has echoed the texture of the skin, metamorphosing and embodying sensory consciousness to an unyielding, inanimate object. Her work tries to build a physical poetics of holes as conduits for an engagement with the audience to address questions of boundaries and proximity.  It has been an extended and ongoing attempt to represent alienation in depictions of compromised human physicality. Her works are shot through with a sense of claustrophobia – of ourselves being repressed by our bodies, and our bodies being repressed and contained by the physical world.

Dudek's work expands the conventions of photography, by making physical installations that incorporate concrete, synthetic materials like latex and security barriers, which are in creative tension with the photographic print.