Marcin Dudek’s major exhibition “Slash & Burn II” included an immersive installation of approximately 300 jackets sewn together into one massive jacket. Important to the artist was that each of these individual jackets had its own unknown history. They had all been worn, lived in and marked by physical experience. Visitors to the exhibition entered through a large sleeve, descended down a set of stairs and into the body of the garment before encountering three mixed-media collages from Dudek’s Passage series. The stairs were covered in medical tape and white paint applied with the artist’s fingers. They were further marked by a performance with an orange smoke grenade, and then trodden upon by each visitor to the exhibition. Over the course of three months, thousands of shoes steadily covered them in dirty footprints. It is this material and the evidence of touch left behind by spectators that forms the surface of Passage V. The traces of each guest become part of the work, which like the jacket made of jackets, is a representation of a staircase constructed from other steps.

Stairs have often figured in Dudek’s work; a fragment of stadium architecture which becomes a potential site of violence as it leads towards the spectacle. The flattening of the staircase provides a means to analyse the events which have taken place, mapping the movements of the crowd. In line with the other Passage works, in Passage V historic images of bomber jackets line the central channel of the work as Dudek creates a path for archival images related to crowd violence in the stadium. These images are expanded by collaged black tape, which emanates from the images as if creating an aura to manifest and amplify the object’s energy; a strategy often used in religious relics. Punctuating the path are deep burns, signaling the violence of the crowd. Using a plasma cutter to destroy the surface, these wounds are like warnings, showing the risk that is present on the steps. Dripping hot pigment from the smoke canisters could be mistaken for dried drops of blood, an image of a potential past. Rips in the horizontal strips of tape are already sutured, with stitches that do not entirely close the wound, allowing us to view the surface of the treated wood below; a reminder of the steps that the material used to wrap around.