Marcin Dudek is showing his multimedia installation Trans Hooligans as part of "Sandcastle", a group exhibition at Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art in Bytom, Poland. This show gathers 15 contemporary artists whose work offers a reflection on the construction of masculinity.
On view from July 5 - August 8, 2025.
Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art
Rynek 26, Bytom, Poland
"Looking at masculinity is not an easy task. For how do you look at a phenomenon which, as a result of centuries of social norms, has been taken for granted and, in its obviousness, almost transparent?
The exhibition "Sandcastle" allows some of the voices that weave the story of the male subject to resonate. It reworks mythical images of conquerors, warriors and armoured bodies, without turning its back on fluid identities and fragile and traumatised corporeality. Using the categories of armour and fortress, separating seemingly integrated identities from potential threats, we run a narrative on the borderline between critique and affirmation. The artists trace the interconnections between acts of violence and acts of care, the need for control and powerlessness, exclusion and the search for community. They look at masculinities from the perspectives of corporeality and sexuality, emotionality, upbringing, interpersonal relationships, work and crises. Critical work on masculinities constantly encounters resistance - for masculinity in crisis seems to be extremely unstable, fragile and prone to injury. In the contemporary Polish political context - in a country where elections are still won by relying on the warrior-patriarch ideal - masculinity is once again appropriated by a conservative narrative that conceptualises it through the figures of the soldier and the hero (figures that perform the longing for stability and a sense of empowerment). The fear of the symbolic loss of masculine control intensifies in the face of political and climatic crises, poisoning gender self-identification with contradictory impulses.
The road to contemporary masculinities cannot bypass those qualities which, properly channelled, allow the social organism to develop in a state of diversity and mutual coexistence of differences. It is an arduous process of looking critically at the fictions of the past, but above all of restoring to men the possibility of assuming roles from which they have historically excluded themselves."
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