"Everyday you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it you become a sculptor." - Louise Bourgeois, "Child Abuse", in Artforum Vol. 21, No.4 (December 1982)
With "Nest", Marcin Dudek presents a culmination of his decade-long series of Memory Boxes - installations which recreate spaces from his past, complete with archival materials such as photos and architectural elements. The entirety of the Dudek family apartment is recreated inside of the gallery space, faithful to its original proportions, 55 square meters inside of the social housing block of Wola Duchaka. Each room contains an element from the space that it represents, as well as an artistic intervention - a painting, a sculpture, the sound of a dripping faucet, the echo of an empty pantry. The memory box isn't a work of nostalgia: it is the visible side of a process of overcoming, which requires bearing witness to the past, reconstructing it in unflinching detail. The viewer is immersed in a landscape which is tethered to reality, but close to a dream; inside the box, maybe there's a stir from those things buried in time, not so far below the surface.