Artforum published a thoughtful review of NEOPLAN, Marcin Dudek's recent solo exhibition at Edel Assanti in London.
Article by Orit Gat
Read the full review here
MARCIN DUDEK
ON A STREET CORNER in London one evening a few months back, Marcin Dudek borrowed a lighter and dedicated his monograph Slash & Burn by setting the edge of the book on fire. This surprising, ruinous signature suited the artist’s work, which draws on his personal history as a soccer hooligan. Born in Poland in 1979, Dudek spent his teenage years following his local club, MKS Cracovia. His installations, performances, paintings, and mixed-media works use sports fandom as a framework through which to investigate the intersections of masculinity, violence, community, and subcultural aesthetics. He uses rough-hewn or industrial materials like metal chains, nylon, and cement; still, there is a tenderness to his portrayal of the lives of his subjects.
NEOPLAN, 2023, on view in Dudek’s exhibition this past summer at the London gallery Edel Assanti, reflects on the important role that bus rides to away games play in football culture. The artist parked the decrepit skeleton of a Dinamo Bucharest fan bus inside the gallery, inviting visitors to walk through the collapsed seats and watch several videos installed among them. A monitor on the dashboard showed a player’s injured toe. Another video included slides of soccer fans asleep on the road. A third, displaying footage of liquids sloshing in a plastic bag, was evocative of a fan’s body after a day of drinking beer and eating junk. Alongside the bus were three works from the series 'Path', 2022, wall-based assemblages of aluminum scraps, shards of glass, steel chains, and printed images of soccer fans that Dudek collected from books and newspapers. During a performance at the show’s opening, the artist lit a smoke grenade and dragged it along the wall, leaving a thick orange line across these works as the audience quickly dispersed onto the street.
Marcin Dudek, Path III, 2023, installation view NEOPLAN, Edel Assanti, London, 2023
And the violence? It can be seductive. Descriptions of violence are full of verbs; its representation involves images of bodies stretched to their full capacity. Dudek’s work combines this sense of looming carnage with references to the history of art (the orange smoke-grenade streak is a reference to the famous blue line in Polish neo-avant-garde artist Edward Krasiński’s studio in Warsaw; the sculpted torsos are reminiscent of antiquity) and to his own history. The work’s emotional charge comes from memory, from what Dudek has described as a sense of unfinished business that lingered with him after he left the group he was part of and went to art school. No longer being part of a group remains with him, like a scar; you don’t need to be a soccer fan to grasp what longing to be part of something is like. “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us,” writes Leslie Jamison in the title essay of her book The Empathy Exams (2014); “it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.” Even those who know nothing about this subculture of soccer hooliganism can readily understand how deeply this personal body of work is shaped by a sense of loss.
