In Passage I (2020) three flyer jackets are stacked gently like hollow vertebrae. With arms outstretched, each one becomes successively disarticulated into ever smaller squares and slivers of tape. Glimpses of the jacket’s orange lining along the central axis create an upward surge, as if to tear the jackets asunder. The entire composition is crowned by a head of sorts comprised of image transfers of floodlights from Heysel Stadium, where in 1985 thirty-nine soccer fans perished in a stampede. The emulsified photo transfers become indexical traces, at times revealed or erased, beneath layers of Dudek’s affective outpourings of anger, ecstasy, and grief.

Once part of a uniform, here the jacket is a container for memories, a metaphor of an individual swept into the wave of an increasingly explosive crowd. Orange is not an accidental color. It’s appearance in the stadium was a ritual foreshadowing of violence, a sign that things were about to get hot. A younger Dudek was one of many Polish football supporters who would turn their jackets inside out as full sections of the stadium suddenly shifted from dark colors into a sea of turbulent orange that would erupt into violence.

Slipping into the jacket’s soft shell for the first time in 1993, Dudek suddenly belonged to something that felt greater than himself. That year, during a match between Poland and England, he turned his jacket inside out and abandoned himself to the melee. His initiation was, too, a descent. From afar, the three jackets are the silhouette of a boy collapsing to his knees. At the very bottom edge of the frame, splinters of orange tape pulse like an EKG. They seem to capture the adrenaline coursing through Dudek’s veins, the blood rushing in his ears. Dudek’s first passage was a fall into soundlessness, save for the pounding of his heart.