Asha Nowak

Asha Nowak (she/her) is a 34-year-old sculptor and installation artist based in Warsaw whose work explores mixed‑race identity through recurring motifs of masked and hidden faces. Born to a Polish mother and an Indian father, Asha grew up moving between small towns and the city, learning early that identity is porous and performative — a theme she treats with both irony and pragmatic curiosity informed by the philosophy of Richard Rorty. She trained at the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw (MFA, 2017), where a studio critique led a visiting curator to include her early bent‑wood sculptures in a regional show; that early discovery helped place her work in national exhibitions and introduced her to an international network without changing the collaborative, process‑driven way she makes art.

Technically, Asha is fascinated by ‘‘material memory’’ — how a piece of wood retains marks of heat, bend, and repair and how those traces can function like skin. Working primarily in bent wood with occasional welded armatures and metal anchors (a practice she attributes in part to the structural daring of David Smith), she builds muted, totemic pieces whose surfaces are treated to evoke elephant skin: fissured patinas, layered varnishes, and compressed grain that read as both tactile armor and delicate epidermis. Her masked faces are often partially hidden behind slats or laminated veneers, suggesting the simultaneity of concealment and exposure in mixed‑race life. The Post‑Internet context of her practice appears in the way she mines online archives, memes, and profile imagery for compositional cues, then translates those ephemeral traces back into stubbornly physical objects that resist scrollability.

Asha’s personality leans toward visible recognition seeking: she curates her public-facing projects, speaks at openings, and cultivates a presence across gallery circuits and social platforms, but she frames that visibility as a resource to create opportunities for others. She is direct about wanting to found a community art space in Warsaw’s Praga district — a cooperative workshop and gallery for artists of diverse backgrounds — and spends significant time fundraising, organizing pop‑up studios, and mentoring younger artists from mixed or immigrant families.

Asha is Deaf/hard of hearing and uses bilateral hearing aids in public and Polish Sign Language (PJM) in collaborative settings; she routinely arranges interpreters and live transcription for talks and studio visits and designs workshops with clear visual facilitation so access is integral to the process rather than an afterthought. This is described matter‑of‑factly in her professional life: her hands are her primary communicative tool in studio, her gestures shape how she teaches, and her installations often incorporate clear visual instructions and diagrams to make participation intuitive.

Her appearance is unvarnished and practical — close‑cropped hair with a streak of gray at the temple, work‑stained fingers with small calluses and a faint burn scar on her left forearm from a kiln incident, olive‑toned skin, and visible behind‑the‑ear hearing aids she will point out in introductions. She favors oversized work shirts and boots in the studio and keeps a thin silver hoop earring that belonged to her grandmother pinned to a cork board as a talisman.

Influenced by Rorty’s anti‑foundationalism and a habit of ironic detachment, Asha titles her shows with wry ambiguities and treats fixed narratives about race and authenticity as things to be negotiated rather than decoded. Her practice sits squarely within Post‑Internet Art: formally concerned with material and texture yet conceptually in conversation with online forms, profile culture, and the ways digital anonymity and curated presence shape the faces we present and hide. She credits the structural freedom of David Smith’s work for encouraging her to treat wood as a medium with as much architectural possibility as metal, while her attention to skin and surface often comes from long, patient studies of pachyderm hide in both field photography and etymological metaphor.

Asha is actively planning the community space she wants to found — a co‑op with flexible studios, a small foundry bench for experimental metalwork, and an exhibition program prioritizing artists from mixed and underrepresented backgrounds. She describes this goal plainly as the next logical step in her practice: channeling public recognition into sustained infrastructure for others. Her work continues to appear in group shows across Central Europe, and she maintains a dense, image‑rich studio archive online that functions as both portfolio and conceptual sketchbook.