In May 1993, 13-year-old Marcin Dudek traveled to Chorzów in Upper Silesia to attend his first national game: England vs. Poland. Stadion Śląski was Poland’s biggest stadium at the time, and as he managed to slip his way through the entrance and into the stadium, he found himself swallowed up by electrifying crowds and violence erupting constantly on each side - a feeling that would become very familiar to him in the years to come. In a moment of victory, the orange-clad hooligans drove the police out of the stadium, overpowering their batons with metal benches, ripped from the stadium’s architecture and made into weapons. Looking back on this game, Dudek recovered an online video which highlighted this moment, still so vivid in the artist’s memory. The work Five Seconds is built around a succession of five video stills which show the iconic triumph as a manifesto or a set of postcards from the event. This horizontal line of five images acts as a small narrative of violence. With this work, the artist asks: how can one describe the emotional impact of five seconds? How can five seconds show all of the culminating emotions and events that led up to that moment?

The constant battles between police and fans, between Polish and English fans, and even amongst Polish fans, turned the stadium into a conflict zone, where a constant choreography of brutality played out. The fights between the hooligans and the police were the most intense - the hools used extreme violence as a way of advertising their discontent with the country’s leadership. Using fists and weapons to show their frustration towards the social systems that had failed them, they banded together to form a much-needed community. This aggression towards the authorities can be seen as payback for the years of violence and oppression that the system they represent inflicted on the Polish people. This only furthered the resolve of the police, who acted also out of fear of being faced with an armed and desperate mass, who finds protection and strength in numbers. As a way to understand the experiences of both sides, Dudek incorporates pages of zines destined both for the police and for dissenters. These show how to control the crowd and correctly use equipment, or how to wash your eyes after a gas attack and to properly use smoke grenades. Two horizontal lines of aerial views of a stadium show a visualisation of a crowd ripping the stadium architecture apart - perhaps a metaphor for the desire of the spectators to destroy it all - the stadium, the government, and the hierarchy imposed upon them.

The imagery depicted in the work relates to fragments of Dudek’s memories: seconds of clarity which are expanded to create a narrative. The organisation of the panels themselves evoke how our brain stitches together recollections: rather than seeing a smooth, cinematic recollection of events, we often get snippets: close-ups of bomber jackets evoke thrown punches and crowded bodies; flood lights blur our vision; a balaclava hides the identity of someone who may be a friend or a foe; flashes of fire break out. The structure of these stills are akin to the chronophotography of Marey or Muybridge, often showing athletic feats broken up into fixed images of bodies in movement. The verticality of the tape bears a striking resemblance to El Lissitsky’s A Runner in the City (1926), allowing our eye to reconstitute disjuncted elements. Vivid heart rates function as emotional fields, letting glimpses of video footage appear through the beating; conveying the sense of urgency and danger. Heightened levels of adrenaline, stress, excitement, and fear are palpable throughout the work. The ensemble of these elements act as panels in a control room - we see aerial views of stadiums alongside these snippets of memory, as we are allowed to take in everything at once, watching the events unfold from afar.