Michael Dudeck

Michael Dudeck Witch Doctor is an artist and cultural engineer whose work spans multiple media and forms including performance art, video/film, drawing, sculpture, web-projects, publications, text-work and installation. In addition he believes actively in his existence itself as Social Sculpture. He is a graduate from the University of Manitoba School of Art, and has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally. He is currently apprenticing with notable artist and healer(s) AA Bronson and Marina Abramovic. In addition, he has just returned from being an Intern at the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York and from two months as the Shaman-In-Residence for Marina Abramovic’s large scale performance retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He has performed recently in the exhibition RITUALIZ’D at Platform Center for Photographic and Digital Arts, Winnipeg, and the residue of the performance as well as one of his installations remains in the gallery until June 24, 2010. He has installed and participated in counter-cultural meccas such as Burning Man (3 times) and has launched his first artist book, Parthenogenesis, available at the Winnipeg Art Gallery Shoppes. Dudeck’s work expores religion and ritual as constructs in a mythopoeic universe he is building. A highly personal and complex mythology, Dudeck is inventing his own religion and presents aspects of that religion in installations, rituals, performances, films and publications. The premise of his religion is the birth of dualism : humans separate into all male, all-female, homo-normative tribes and eventually war ensues between both parties and the ultimate result is a series of genders, endlessly reproducing into more and more multiplicity. He has created three languages that correspond to various tribes and his next solo exhibition, Amygdala, to be presented at Ace Art in Winnipeg, January, 2011 will present a chronological timeline of the first epochs of this universe. He considers himself an anthropologist studying this world as he creates it, and as High Priest overseeing the order of the religion he is currently inventing. Dudeck is a nomad, a mystic seeker and a counter-cultural diva.

www.michaeldudeck.com