Kika Sroka-Miller is AN ARTist, writer and publisher based in london, UK.
THey Are intERESTED IN how Opposites dominate our understanding of the world and ourselves.
The artist’s current work explores the tension between pleasure and unease, thought and flesh, mind and body, human and technology, taboo and the ordinary, masculinity and femininity, as well as figuration and abstraction and the visual and the verbal.
As a painter working at the border of figuration and abstraction, Sroka-Miller approaches painting as a form of fantasising. Their work revels in power play; the power of paint (to control the painter’s actions) and the power of the painter (to control the parameters of a viewer’s experience). Making sense of these dynamics in terms of domination and surrender the artist draws themselves and the viewer towards a form of edgeplay with nuance and innuendo, inviting us to - like them - submit to the tension and release of meaning that painting can create. .
Sroka Miller is influenced by the queer communities and culture they are a part of as well as contemporary philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, gender theory and politics. Before dedicating themselves fully to their art practice they were Director of the nonfiction publisher Zed Books.
Grounded in painting, but spanning writing and drawing, curation and publishing, Sroka-Miller’s practice is ultimately concerned with notions of autonomy, liberation and freedom from the power structures that limit us individually and collectively. They believe that desire kick-starts personal and social change. Their work imagines queerness beyond individualised, liberal notions of identity and orientation, instead seeing it as a collective potentiality of emancipatory desire, play and passion.
Sroka-Miller is the Founder of Blue Parlour, a creative network and curatorial project sharing the work of artists exploring sexuality through their practice. They have an MA in Gender and Sexuality (Birkbeck, UL, 2008) and a BA in Graphic Design (Camberwell College of Art, UAL, 2007). They are currently on a year out from the Turps Painting School programme (2023-24 completed, with a planned return 2025-26).
CV
Selected shows, prizes, talks and publications:
2025
03/25 - Jackson’s Art Prize 2026, Longlisted
03/25 - “The Colour Formally Known as Incarnation": On the meaning of pink”, A Pastel Palette, 2025, Cade Curatorial
03/25 - Quiet. Bright. Terrace Gallery
02/25 - “Polly-morphous Perverse”, Playing Femme, 2025, 16Collective
2024
11/24 - Art on a Postcard, Gathering
11/24 - Tenth Anniversary Auction, Art on a Postcard
10/24 - Mixtape 8, online group show, Cultivate Gallery
10/24 - Collapse, group show, Safehouse 1
06/24 - Here, There be Monsters, group show, Safehouse 1
05/24 - Waverton Art Prize 2024, Shortlisted
05/24 - Mixtape 7, online group show, Cultivate Gallery
05/24 - Turps Painting School Spring Show, Thameside Gallery, London
02/24 - Love, dir. Gaspar Noé, Post-screening talk ‘Looking at sex and art and sexy art’ for La Fomo, Whirled Cinema, London
2023
12/23 - Polly-morphous Perverse, or Polly Pocket is obviously a femme top, Exhibition text and publication for Hush Lil Baby by Shea Myles, 16 Nicholson St Gallery, Glasgow, supported by The Henry Moore Foundation
09/23 - Enrolled Turps Painting School 2023/24
06/23 - Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize, Longlisted, Ruth Borchard Collection
06/23 - Assembly House Biennial Summer Show 2023, juried group exhibition, Assembly House Trust, Norwich
04/23 - Spring Show, group show, Folkestone Art Gallery, Folkestone
2022
10/22 - We are what we see, group show, Glimpses of Art Agency at 347 Old Street
Follow Kika and their work on Instagram.
BIOGRAPHY
Kika Sroka-Miller has been exhibiting since October 2022. The artist’s work was first shown in the We are what we see exhibition alongside internationally established artists Michaela Stark, Floria Sigismondi and Sandro Kopp, a show organised by Glimpses of Art Agency during Frieze. Since then their work has been included in the Tenth Anniversary Auction of Art on a Postcard 2024, shortlisted for the Waverton Art Prize 2024, selected for the Assembly House Trust Biennial 2023 and been shown in multiple group shows and juried exhibitions around the UK. They are the Founder of Blue Parlour, a creative network and curatorial project sharing the work of artists exploring sexuality through their practice.
Before dedicating themselves fully to their art practice, Sroka-Miller was Director of the publishing house, Zed Books. Zed housed the works of many notable writers including Eleanor Roosevelt, Nawal El Saadawi, Assata Shakur, Maggie Nelson, Fidel Castro and Yanis Varoufakis, among others. Under their Direction the press became the world’s largest co-operative book publisher, making political interventions in queer, feminist, postcolonial and critical race theory.
Sroka-Miller holds an MA in Gender, Sexuality, Politics and Culture, from Birkbeck College, University of London. They also have a BA Hons in Graphic Design from Camberwell College of Art and studied business administration at London School of Economics (LSE). They are currently on a year out from the Turps Painting School programme (2023-24 completed, with a planned return 2025-26).
Artist’s statement
I paint the surfaces of things, these things are amorphous, polymorphous, they are of the body and the body’s edge, where it stops being and something else begins. This is something I think about a lot; where a thing stops being and something else is, or something else starts. Julia Kristeva’s milk skin - disgusting, alluring - is still the best description of the abject that I’ve come across.
My paintings play with surface and orifice, flesh and hole, internal and external, porosity and boundary, always searching for the in between. The in between! The grey area of nuance, except my greys are pink. My painting is play between the unknown and the recognisable, between feeling and knowing, between the unease and pleasure we experience when looking. “Ah yes! I recognise what that is.”
Why do I describe my painting as queer?
Painting in every orientation is a fundamental part of my painting process, I change the orientation of my canvases regularly, perhaps hourly perhaps more often, and although I might have a preferred orientation it is never fixed. But queerness is more than just orientation. It is beyond orientation, beyond identity, it’s fluidity in relation.
Painting allows me to experience a multitude of relational positions. What I mean by that is that sometimes the paint leads, sometimes I do, I don’t know which happens more, because this D/s dynamic (dominance and submission) is one I only register in hindsight when I step back and look at how a painting has changed.
And yet the painting came from me, my thoughts and from the movement of my flesh and bone. I am responsible and accountable for the painting that is being created, even if the paint pushed me and the painting elsewhere, it is from me. This is the thing with paint, it has a material existence that is separate to my own. The same can not be said for words, Gaugin taught me that. Did you know he was a prolific writer?
How far can the materiality of me extend beyond me?
I am interested in the concept of the transhuman, how the human can be extended by technology. I currently have a PICC line fitted for medical treatment I am receiving, although not in the arm I paint with. Is paint a technology? Foucault might say yes.
I don’t think of my painting as a set of distinct marks, or a linear progression of gestures. I see each ‘instance of paint’ as an incorporation into the whole polymorphous perversity of the developing picture - a developing materiality that is me and beyond me. And of course every painting is a fetish object; the painter’s and the viewer’s fantasies and desires reified in space through pigment. Our collective desire reified.
(Dis)orientation, nonbinaristic exploration and explicit acknowledgement of power, these ideas underpin my painting as it’s currently oozing out of me.