The scorching summer days of 1995. Marcin was no more than 16 years old at the time when he travelled to Krakow, along with a group of young football fans on their way to a match in Bialystok. And yet, neither Marcin nor the other people in the group made it to their destination. They’d stopped at the Hutnik Warszawa Stadium after getting a tip from Polonia, a friendly team from the capital, that fans of the opposing team Legia Warszawa were there. Marcin remembers a great deal of smoke and the chaos of policemen on horses clashing with the horde of young football fans. The whole thing happened in the wink of an eye. They then spent 8 hours in a muggy cell at the police station in Zoliborz, waiting to be questioned. This biographical motif that trails the path of a football fan getting cut off along the way, barring him from arriving at his destination, becomes the prevailing theme of Trans Hooligans.

Beginning from the biographical experience of his unsuccessful trip to see a football game, Marcin Dudek sketches out a whole spectrum of critiques of the radical nature of the ultra community, which he had once been a part of. The work’s foundation is a deconstructed Volkswagen Transporter. There isn’t much left of its original form, having been cut up into strips that were then worked into a “cage” or “cell.” The cage is a characteristic element of ultra culture – we see them at the stadium, but many of the most fervent fanatics also end up in a cage after getting picked up and transported to the police station. The space of the cell has been covered in a flag made of fabric quilted out of the characteristic elements of ultra garb – training pants, tops, sport shoes, custom scarves and caps, which represent a fetishism of masculinity that has been cultivated in the fanatic subculture of football enthusiasts – which is raw, at times aggressive and even toxic. Inside, screens show images such as ultras sleeping in the “ashtray pose” or lulled to sleep by their drink of choice, a mashup of ultras boasting about what hooliganism they’d just gotten up to, or a collection of images and videos of hools posing shirtless, flexing their oiled muscles, while others run out naked onto the pitch or show off their naked asses, revealing the toxicity and contradictory signals sent by the desire to appear masculine.

Adapted from the exhibition text by Sebastian Gawłowski