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What Grows, June 2023
Galeria Import Export, Warsaw, Poland
What Grows, June 2023
Galeria Import Export, Warsaw, Poland
What Grows by Marlene A. Schenk
There are things in this world no one can see with the eyes – sound, smell, touch, feelings, gravity, air. In Mia Dudek’s work, this world lays within gentle, low contrast: Organic foamy forms taking over brutal architecture, soft surfaces growing into derma-landscapes, expanding mushrooms bathing within pigmented resin. In her experimental practice, that varies from sculpture and painting to photography and installative works, Mia Dudek shifts between the architectural and the organic, exploring their ambiguity. She is blending both terms; a soft body becomes concrete and solid materials become light and spongy tangibles.
When looking at the characteristics of both skins and walls, her artworks first lead to the belief it’s mostly surface. What one cannot see when observing superficially, is what grows beneath: the amount, the power, the roots. Fungi, another focus in her practice, get their nutrients from the soil or wood in which they grow. In Fruiting Bodies, I - VIII (Resin series), 2023, as well as the sculptural work Wash Basin (II), 2023, Dudek gives a foggy glimpse into this world beneath. The half see-through pigmented resin shimmers within a metal frame; bathing inside are mushrooms of all kinds. The expansion of the Fruiting Body Series resembles an intimate and maternal state. It is the magical, as well as fearful and always unknown moment of reproduction the artist has captured within the motif. The self-cleansing of something that is neither fruit nor animal, an organism that replicates itself. Dudek creates an environment that works with intimacy and occupation, and within the basin of mystical water it becomes bodily.
On a formal level, her photographic works of Fruiting Bodies (2023) focus on the arrangement, referring to the almost mathematical structures in which nature repeats itself. What one sees with the eyes is the seemingly uncontrollable growing of organisms, its exponential growth. These mushrooms are seemingly unflattering, dangerously formed, while at the same time shining extraterrestrially, almost erotic. It is their pale and gentle coloring that keeps the image from comparing their forceful growth to a catastrophic bomb [1]. The mushroom represents the fine line between health and death, a timeless and lingering danger.
When scratching a surface, it becomes clear quite quickly that it’s also the human body you cannot control – in Dudek’s Skin Series (2023), they are shining from within. A body that is trapped, cosmic and obscure looking. Bones and flesh take on a brutal orange and violet color, creating a captivating moon-like landscape. Like the mushrooms, exploding from within.
It is the uncontrollable outcome of growth – originating from the soul, of fears and trauma. Expressions of certain feelings are always part of an unconscious output; something that exploded within and is now coming to the surface. It is the paradox of not knowing where it grew. Because like fungi, they timelessly grow somewhere inside a person, unaware of being good or bad. There certainly are things in this world one cannot see – but within the Mia Dudek’s works, this world becomes a surface of all things inhabiting it: from its captured landscapes to arrangements of underlying explosions, her practice tries to gently guide one through the terror of it with tenderness.
[1] Radioactivity of food from the areas particularly affected by the Chernobyl-Reactor accident: In 1993, the following percentages of tested samples exceeded the limit value: mushrooms 63%, berries 35%, venison 24%, birch juice 4%. In: Der Reaktorunfall in Tschernobyl von 1986 – ein Ausblick der BAGS Hamburg nach 10 Jahre, Behörde für Arbeit, Gesundheit und Soziales, 1996.
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Inside Out, March 2023
Galeria Foco, Lisbon, Portugal
Sounds of Kindness: On “Inside Out” by Josseline Black
An orchestra is defined as a “large group of musicians who play many different instruments together and are led by a conductor”. Such an orchestra periodically will play a symphony, usually composed within 4 movements, but not necessarily. Alban Berg, the Austrian music theorist and composer said of Gustav Mahler´s 9th and last symphony “I have once more played through Mahler’s Ninth. The first movement is the most glorious he ever wrote. It expresses an extraordinary love of the earth, for Nature. The longing to live on it in peace, to enjoy it completely, to the very heart of one’s being, before death comes, as irresistibly it does.” In addition to the possibility for transcendence and ultimate stimulation, one of of the powers of Mahler´s 9th symphony is its intricacy, detail by detail, its unfolds like the veins of a leaf or the edges of coral. Dramatically and organically. Honoring the orchestral necessitates honoring relationships between consonance and dissonance. These same variables can be applied to living (even if briefly) with an art work which when brought down to fundamentals, can be harmonic, or not.
Here, we see, Mia Dudek´s explorations into photography, sculpture, and painting which resonate gently and strongly. There is tenderness in the color palette, and in the interplay of media a certain vulnerability arises. One of the core reasons for such sensitivity is that Dudek chooses her domestic worlds as a way of making sense of her multi-fold situatedness which places her between Lisbon, Warsaw, and London. Integrating and communicating with these distinct environments requires a level of receptivity which comes through in this work. How can we truly inhabit and make home in a place? A kind of networking is needed, at the level of the nervous system, socially, and economically. Connecting. Working with her subjectivity in such a way, Dudek directly embodies the rhizomatic structure in her mode of constructing her own belonging.
One of the key figures of Dudek´s work is the mushroom and implicitly the mycelial. They are immortalised and mythologised, and act as metaphors for the biography not only of the artist but of any viewer. Inside Out, is also a way of testing elasticity. This is evidenced in Dudek´s approach to the materials she manipulates. If they cannot be pushed and pulled then they have not shown their true identities. Encountering this voluminous environment, we cannot help but have our own edges be softened. This process finds its metaphor in the quality of diffused light that is present in the paintings of Vermeer, from which Dudek draws influence. This light is mythical and simultaneously sunrise and twilight. It is an evanescent light which comes through in Dudek´s choice of iridescence for her canvases. The brushstrokes evoke the circular movement of cleaning surfaces in one’s kitchen or polishing the floor of one’s bedroom. These curves remind us of moments of solitude and meditation as we maintain our own spaces. Their forms left behind are evidence of our care. Further offering a pathway into intimacy, Dudek reshapes the gallery to sculpt a new architecture which is reminiscent of both a home and studio under construction. We are invited to make ourselves comfortable. In the making, being in the making, making the being.
Within “Inside Out” there is inhalation and exhalation; there is the full cycle of breath from the first to the last. There is also an invisible wave which expands and contracts over the body of each artwork. This wave is unpredictable. Since Dudek works directly with tension, she allows for release, as a wave crashes on the shore of a beach or into this exhibition space as a generalised sense of acceptance. The title of the exhibition calls to mind precedents set by psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and mysticism which hold that interior psychosomatic work has exterior effects. Furthermore, when the inner is turned outwards, transformation is possible through self exposure. This is a practice of honesty in action. “Inside Out” works against a purist´s exercise in conceptualism by weaving instead of forcing geometries of thought. It accesses the viewer as if to offer a massage or hold up their body in the ocean. In a sense, it is also kind. This movement towards the other on behalf of the artist is arguably a very personal reach for harmony. All of this is symphonic.
- Josseline Black, March 2023
Inside Out, March 2023
Galeria Foco, Lisbon, Portugal
Sounds of Kindness: On “Inside Out” by Josseline Black
An orchestra is defined as a “large group of musicians who play many different instruments together and are led by a conductor”. Such an orchestra periodically will play a symphony, usually composed within 4 movements, but not necessarily. Alban Berg, the Austrian music theorist and composer said of Gustav Mahler´s 9th and last symphony “I have once more played through Mahler’s Ninth. The first movement is the most glorious he ever wrote. It expresses an extraordinary love of the earth, for Nature. The longing to live on it in peace, to enjoy it completely, to the very heart of one’s being, before death comes, as irresistibly it does.” In addition to the possibility for transcendence and ultimate stimulation, one of of the powers of Mahler´s 9th symphony is its intricacy, detail by detail, its unfolds like the veins of a leaf or the edges of coral. Dramatically and organically. Honoring the orchestral necessitates honoring relationships between consonance and dissonance. These same variables can be applied to living (even if briefly) with an art work which when brought down to fundamentals, can be harmonic, or not.
Here, we see, Mia Dudek´s explorations into photography, sculpture, and painting which resonate gently and strongly. There is tenderness in the color palette, and in the interplay of media a certain vulnerability arises. One of the core reasons for such sensitivity is that Dudek chooses her domestic worlds as a way of making sense of her multi-fold situatedness which places her between Lisbon, Warsaw, and London. Integrating and communicating with these distinct environments requires a level of receptivity which comes through in this work. How can we truly inhabit and make home in a place? A kind of networking is needed, at the level of the nervous system, socially, and economically. Connecting. Working with her subjectivity in such a way, Dudek directly embodies the rhizomatic structure in her mode of constructing her own belonging.
One of the key figures of Dudek´s work is the mushroom and implicitly the mycelial. They are immortalised and mythologised, and act as metaphors for the biography not only of the artist but of any viewer. Inside Out, is also a way of testing elasticity. This is evidenced in Dudek´s approach to the materials she manipulates. If they cannot be pushed and pulled then they have not shown their true identities. Encountering this voluminous environment, we cannot help but have our own edges be softened. This process finds its metaphor in the quality of diffused light that is present in the paintings of Vermeer, from which Dudek draws influence. This light is mythical and simultaneously sunrise and twilight. It is an evanescent light which comes through in Dudek´s choice of iridescence for her canvases. The brushstrokes evoke the circular movement of cleaning surfaces in one’s kitchen or polishing the floor of one’s bedroom. These curves remind us of moments of solitude and meditation as we maintain our own spaces. Their forms left behind are evidence of our care. Further offering a pathway into intimacy, Dudek reshapes the gallery to sculpt a new architecture which is reminiscent of both a home and studio under construction. We are invited to make ourselves comfortable. In the making, being in the making, making the being.
Within “Inside Out” there is inhalation and exhalation; there is the full cycle of breath from the first to the last. There is also an invisible wave which expands and contracts over the body of each artwork. This wave is unpredictable. Since Dudek works directly with tension, she allows for release, as a wave crashes on the shore of a beach or into this exhibition space as a generalised sense of acceptance. The title of the exhibition calls to mind precedents set by psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and mysticism which hold that interior psychosomatic work has exterior effects. Furthermore, when the inner is turned outwards, transformation is possible through self exposure. This is a practice of honesty in action. “Inside Out” works against a purist´s exercise in conceptualism by weaving instead of forcing geometries of thought. It accesses the viewer as if to offer a massage or hold up their body in the ocean. In a sense, it is also kind. This movement towards the other on behalf of the artist is arguably a very personal reach for harmony. All of this is symphonic.
- Josseline Black, March 2023
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Fillers, 2022
Spazio Volta, Bergamo, Italy
Text by Federico Castoldi
In Ancient Greece the Earth was described in two different ways corresponding to two differing dimensions: the first was Chtonia and the second, still used today, was Gaia. Chtonia referred to the Earth below the surface, while Gaia referred to the Earth above the surface.
Chtonia was the abyss, the world of the spirit, the dead, the secret; a world that can only show itself through its superficial side, Gaia. Gaia was the hill, the green, the walkable: the fruit, the excrescence. Metaphorically, if the earth were a fungal formation, Chtonia would be the mycelium and Gaia its fungus.
Since the beginning of modernity, there has been a progressive distancing from the Cht- onic dimension of life. Agamben says: “life is more lovable the more tenderly it preserves within itself the memory of Chtonia”. But where can we look for this today? It is a matter of opening a gap – a cthon – an opening that can relate the present with the past, the deep with the superficial.
The Spazio Volta Project finds its identity in this tension, between the underground of the cistern and the glass wall on the surface. Mia Dudek’s works, in conversation with the former San Rocco’s fountain, converses with its cracks, its fractures, becoming their excrescence that makes its memory resurface, invading its most hidden corners.
Mia’s works investigate the duly guarded memory, the perpetuation of history that re-emerges in the present. Her fruits are symptomatic of a profound, inner relationship, of a series of processes that manifest themselves through silicone and polyurethane foam, recurring elements of the practice as well as rust, a bathtub and a 19th century tap. By recreating an evocative environment of organic and inorganic presences, Mia is giving form to the formless which now appears on cast iron and stone.
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Manhattan, September 2021
Import Export Gallery, Warsaw, Poland
Concrete home
Concrete day
Concrete Work
Home home
Lift, shop
Concrete home
Balcony home
Home home
* Excerpt from “Radioaktywny Blok” [Radioactive Block] (1982) by Brygada Kryzys [Crisis Brigade]
Import Export is excited to present MANHATTAN – a new exhibition by Mia Dudek, spanning photography, sculpture, installation and painting. Taking its name from the slang term used to describe large housing estates in Poland, MANHATTAN is spread across three themed exhibition rooms, bringing together work from three new and continuing series – Inhabited, Fruiting Bodies, and the recently commenced Such a Landscape – as well as three sculptural installations.
Born in Sosnowiec, an industrial town in the south of Poland, Dudek spent her teenage years in Warsaw, before she moved to London to pursue her studies in photography. After completing her BA at London College of Communications (2012) and her MA at The Royal College of Art (2016), she expanded her practice to installation and sculpture – in which she is currently completing a PhD at the University of Lisbon.
Moving across media and changing home countries – from Poland to England to Portugal – Dudek developed a singular language of expression related to depictions of the domestic and urban spheres. In her practice, the artist continuously probes the relationship between the body and the architectural fabric, while exploring notions of intimacy, displacement and inhabiting.
Verging between archival fever and nostalgia trip, Dudek has spent the last decade creating a tender, personal register of big bloc architecture and its interiors. They are most often rendered as photography prints but also take the form of seductive sculptural and installation works. Juxtaposing elements such as raw concrete and hard metals with soft expanding foams and organic materials like latex and resin, Dudek’s homely installations are evocative – and at times suggestive – of the day-to-day activities of their supposed inhabitants: soaking in the bathtub, tanning on the balcony or killing time by the carpet hanger – a design staple in the residential areas in Central and Eastern Europe. Adding to the allure of Dudek’s environments are the uncanny, erotic photographs of the multicoloured oyster mushroom, which often proliferate on walls and in corners of rooms designed by the artist – as if proving that life forms can find their way even in the harshest of habitats.
With the exhibition at Import Export, Dudek continues her inquiry into the eroticism of brutalist forms and the quest for the limits of her media.
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Feelers, 2020
Solo Show
Foco Gallery, Lisbon, Poland
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Marsyas, April 2019
Galerist, Istanbul, Turkey
Text by Nick Hackworth
The brief tale recounts the hubris and gruesome fate of Marsyas. A satyr and follower of Dionysius he lived in Phrygia, a kingdom that existed in what is now Anatolia. A gifted flute player, Marsyas rashly challenged Apollo, the god of music himself, to a contest to decide who was the better musician, with the agreement that the loser would submit to whatever punishment the victor chose. Only when he cheated, by adding his divine voice to the sound of his lyre, did Apollo win. In vengeance for daring to challenge a god, Apollo flayed Marsyas alive and nailed his skin to a nearby pine tree. The torrents of tears shed by the creatures, nymphs, gods and goddesses that mourned Marsyas, fell upon the earth, intermingled and became the source of the Meander river, now known as the Büyük Menderes River.
This strange and violent story was a touchstone in Classical, particularly Roman, culture. For populists Marsyas became a symbol and mythic martyr for liberty, freedom of expression and the right to speak truth to power. To authoritarians his fate was a warning to the forces of chaos and misrule.
This exhibition brings together in dialogue two powerful bodies of work, each created in response to the story of Marsyas.
Mia Dudek’s latest series, Marsyas, Dudek plays with and juxtaposes various ways to picture, represent and manifest skin. The works are all about surface and surfaces. Unusually composed, close-up shots of bodies and body parts, render them almost alien and unfamiliar. The bodies seem restricted, covered in some with clear plastic in some images and strained, muscles and veins bulging in others. Dudek further complicates her depiction of skin with varying material productions of the works. Dudek’s series presents a world in which Marsyas’ subjection to punishment has become the default state.
Arda Asena has especially created a series of sculptures and sculptural installations for this exhibition and in response to the myth and Dudek’s body of work. The works develop a line of sculptural enquiry in which Asena uses fabric-based sculptures to depict, in semi-abstract fashion, bodily forms. Some are formed of stuffed, flesh coloured stockings lying abjectly, in corners, draped over plinths or suspended from the ceiling – skinless bodies, their innards waiting to spill out. Others are formed by being stretched between walls, the fabric pulled into translucency by the physical tension, an abstract echo of the Marsyas’ flaying at the hands of a tyrannical god. An oblique but powerful sculptural achievement. The exhibition includes a collaborative sound work, inspired by the Marsyas myth, by Arda Arsena and Ömer Bil.
Dudek and Asena’s work combine to conjure a disturbing sensibility of tortured physicality, echoing the pessimistic wisdom of the myth of Marsyas, that suffering is more common than justice.
Arda Asena (b. 1992, Turkey. Lives and works in New York, US) works with photography, film and sculpture. He has been taking photographs of bodies wrapped and imprisoned in stockings which led him to experiment with sculptures that the abstract shapes better translate the restriction and of times estrangement to living in one’s own body. His concerns overlap considerably with Dudek’s namely; a fascination and pessimism about our physical presence in the work and the alienation of modern sexuality.
Mia Dudek (b. 1989, Poland. Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal) has in recent years developed a compelling and experimental photographic practice that expands at times into the sculptural realm. Her focus has been on what she describes as 'the broken physicality between individuals’ – 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.
Marsyas, April 2019
Galerist, Istanbul, Turkey
Text by Nick Hackworth
The brief tale recounts the hubris and gruesome fate of Marsyas. A satyr and follower of Dionysius he lived in Phrygia, a kingdom that existed in what is now Anatolia. A gifted flute player, Marsyas rashly challenged Apollo, the god of music himself, to a contest to decide who was the better musician, with the agreement that the loser would submit to whatever punishment the victor chose. Only when he cheated, by adding his divine voice to the sound of his lyre, did Apollo win. In vengeance for daring to challenge a god, Apollo flayed Marsyas alive and nailed his skin to a nearby pine tree. The torrents of tears shed by the creatures, nymphs, gods and goddesses that mourned Marsyas, fell upon the earth, intermingled and became the source of the Meander river, now known as the Büyük Menderes River.
This strange and violent story was a touchstone in Classical, particularly Roman, culture. For populists Marsyas became a symbol and mythic martyr for liberty, freedom of expression and the right to speak truth to power. To authoritarians his fate was a warning to the forces of chaos and misrule.
This exhibition brings together in dialogue two powerful bodies of work, each created in response to the story of Marsyas.
Mia Dudek’s latest series, Marsyas, Dudek plays with and juxtaposes various ways to picture, represent and manifest skin. The works are all about surface and surfaces. Unusually composed, close-up shots of bodies and body parts, render them almost alien and unfamiliar. The bodies seem restricted, covered in some with clear plastic in some images and strained, muscles and veins bulging in others. Dudek further complicates her depiction of skin with varying material productions of the works. Dudek’s series presents a world in which Marsyas’ subjection to punishment has become the default state.
Arda Asena has especially created a series of sculptures and sculptural installations for this exhibition and in response to the myth and Dudek’s body of work. The works develop a line of sculptural enquiry in which Asena uses fabric-based sculptures to depict, in semi-abstract fashion, bodily forms. Some are formed of stuffed, flesh coloured stockings lying abjectly, in corners, draped over plinths or suspended from the ceiling – skinless bodies, their innards waiting to spill out. Others are formed by being stretched between walls, the fabric pulled into translucency by the physical tension, an abstract echo of the Marsyas’ flaying at the hands of a tyrannical god. An oblique but powerful sculptural achievement. The exhibition includes a collaborative sound work, inspired by the Marsyas myth, by Arda Arsena and Ömer Bil.
Dudek and Asena’s work combine to conjure a disturbing sensibility of tortured physicality, echoing the pessimistic wisdom of the myth of Marsyas, that suffering is more common than justice.
Arda Asena (b. 1992, Turkey. Lives and works in New York, US) works with photography, film and sculpture. He has been taking photographs of bodies wrapped and imprisoned in stockings which led him to experiment with sculptures that the abstract shapes better translate the restriction and of times estrangement to living in one’s own body. His concerns overlap considerably with Dudek’s namely; a fascination and pessimism about our physical presence in the work and the alienation of modern sexuality.
Mia Dudek (b. 1989, Poland. Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal) has in recent years developed a compelling and experimental photographic practice that expands at times into the sculptural realm. Her focus has been on what she describes as 'the broken physicality between individuals’ – 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.