Artist: Mia Dudek

Solo exhibition by Mia Dudek as part of London Gallery Weekend @ Salon by IMPORT EXPORT

Polish-born Mia Dudek is a graduate of London College of Communication and Royal College of Art – since 2019, she has lived and worked in Lisbon. In her practice, spanning photography, sculpture, installation and painting, the artist probes the relationship between the female body and the architectural fabric. Drawing inspiration from social archives, literature, and personal experiences, she explores notions of intimacy, domesticity and inhabiting, focusing on moments of friction and transgression between spatial, corporeal, and emotional realities.
Most recently, Dudek made a significant departure from the medium of photography – so far integral to her research on the body and space – in favour of painting. This shift was born from a reflection on bodily inefficiency – not as a disability, but as a liminal state that forces the subject to reformulate their understanding of the body, purpose and identity. Dudek’s images do not represent, but act as organic events, bodily discharges that materialise from the tension between the visible and the invisible.
In the words of Dr Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz: "(...) Dudek comes forward with an aesthetics of leaking, evoking a state in which bodies, transcending their boundaries, disintegrate and proliferate simultaneously. The bathtub epitomizes water and amniotic fluid, soaking in and spilling. Here, the artist does not seek to highlight a hydrofeminist solidarity of aqueous bodies but sees the spilling of water and bodies as a process in which cracks mark a rotting battleground of fighting for one’s own place and identity (...)".
This new exhibition brings together Dudek’s most recent painting series “Waiting Room”, with her signature “Fruiting Bodies” photographs and an installation created in situ that spills into the interior of the Salon.
The exhibition coincides with multiple institutional exhibitions, awards and nominations for the artist: CK Zamek in Poznań, CCA Toruń, photo basel, Hopper Prize, Sidney Nolan Art Prize.