"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)
Marcin Dudek was ten years old, living in a social housing block on the outskirts of Kraków, when the Polish People’s Republic was dissolved and the country began its turbulent transition into capitalism. All of a sudden, the national order collapsed: state industries were shuttered; social structures were fractured; severe shortages and soaring inflation soon followed.
For the working class, daily life became a matter of scarcity, resilience, and improvisation. Growing up in this turmoil, Dudek learned how environments marked by such pressure shape identities, behaviors, and collective bonds. His artistic practice stems from a deep and ongoing exploration of these formative memories, and the wider social phenomena which shaped them.
In “NEST”, this excavation project takes an architectural form: Dudek’s childhood apartment has been rebuilt inside of the exhibition space, complete with archival photos and original fixtures. Visitors must climb the stairs and cross a narrow hallway to enter the claustrophobic flat, where the artist lived from 1980 - 2001 with seven family members. Once inside the immersive installation, a path guides the viewer through the kitchen, the bedrooms, the toilet, their functional logic and their emotional residue spilling into the present. Altogether, the apartment operates as a hybrid of period room, sculptural installation, and theatrical backdrop. Sometimes, a clue inside of the space hints at a story: a visit from social services; a teenage Dudek copying paintings from magazines, unknowingly preparing what would become his way out.
Upon exiting the apartment, the project extends from the family unit to the neighborhood haunt, Café Cobra. This pub, once deeply embedded in Kraków’s underground culture, is recreated in the gallery through architectural interventions and enlarged archival imagery. Cobra’s regulars make ghostly appearances in oil paintings, their stories seeping through acidic colors on wooden panels. Together, the works capture the energy of a community, which (like many housing projects) faces the constant threat of erasure from urban redevelopment.
Throughout “NEST”, Dudek draws from this well of experiences, using reconstruction as a critical tool to question how identities are formed in the intimate sphere of private life. His approach echoes the archival and site-specific sensibilities of Harald Szeemann, who famously treated personal history as a curatorial medium. Like Szeeman, Dudek positions individual memory as a lens through which broader cultural and social dynamics can be explored.
