December 8, 2022-January 6, 2023
Ivy Brown Gallery
This event is recommended by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
In Magdalena Dukiewicz’s exhibition “Body turns object”, artist DNA has literally been integrated into the artworks. In addition to her blood, which Dukiewicz frequently utilizes in her art practice, she also uses her hair, collected meticulously since she was twelve years old. Various colors – dark brown from her teenage, to different tones of brown and blonde, and finally, gray- trace the process of growing, maturing, and becoming a self-aware woman in a patriarchal society. This process comes with the realization of how hair within the female body becomes sexualized and fetishized and turns, absurdly, into a battlefield. In her show “Body turns object” Dukiewicz plays with those culturally and politically charged bodily products and recontextualizes them into works of art, exploring how their perceptions linked to the changing contexts.
Dukiewicz’s work is grounded in her process and the materials used. She juxtaposes organic material (hydrolyzed collagen), bodilyfluids (blood) and body parts (hair) with upcycled and repurposed industrial materials scraped from demolished buildings such as welded steel, wire mesh, and metal rods. Her works mine the tension and exchange between these contrasting materials, combining the ephemeral and the solid, the soft and the firm. Each piece provokes visceral reactions while playfully welcoming open-ended associations and ambiguities.
Embodying Dukiewicz’s interest in materiality, absurdity, irony, and incompatibility, “Body turns object” brings to the fore the temporalities of exhibition and interpretation, elucidating the contextual nature of perception and the experience of an artwork over the passage of time. The artist embraces the ideas of transformation and disappearance, and the reciprocal relationships that exist between her works and their viewers and environments.
In those bizarre and troubling shapes displayed here, metal parts combine with the artist’s body products becoming, perversely, an aesthetic object. Dukiewicz re-claims ownership over her body, by re-gaining control over how her body is used and presented.“Body turns object” presents the body as a revolutionary space of antagonism and freedom, expression and research, self-definition and power, identity, and gender.
Dukiewicz reconceptualizes artworks as an imprint of memory and the body that is at once transformative, sensual, and reflective; playfully realized and politically charged.
Lead image: Magdalena Dukiewicz, Object1, steel, human hair, 9”x12”x8”, 2022.
