Marcin Dudek's solo exhibition NEST has been featured in Artforum Magazine, in a thoughtful review by Niels Van Tomme.
“NEST” was Marcin Dudek’s full-scale reconstruction of the five-hundred-square-foot apartment on the outskirts of Kraków, Poland, where he grew up, as well as a reimagining of the notorious neighborhood bar that was located in the same building. Now based in Brussels, Dudek lived in this prefab-housing block at a time when Poland transitioned from state socialism to capitalism. It provided a harsh communal environment marked by the scarcity and instability experienced by its working-class residents.
Two details immediately caught my attention when I walked into Dudek’s intricately layered spatial reconstruction of the apartment, which was left bare but included meticulously installed sculptural elements, paintings, drawings, collages, documents, photographs, and sounds, instead of furniture and decoration. One was the frail white embroidery that sealed the window areas and ceilings throughout the installation; the other was a series of burn marks on much of the wall. Both details suggest a metaphorical notion of reconstruction: Instead of straightforwardly documenting a social reality, Dudek shifts, destroys, mutates, and recomposes traces of the lives contained within these walls, as well as within the remarkable origins of his artistic practice. Most notably, Dudek was once a football hooligan, an experience he has explored extensively in previous exhibitions and to which he refers in some of the works and documents displayed here. In recent years, however, the focus of his practice has widened toward a more contextual exploration of his family background and the historical and spatial contexts in which he grew up.
Dudek’s meticulously constructed exhibition recalls Svetlana Boym’s notion of reflective nostalgia, which connects the trope of longing to ideas of loss and displacement. Reflective nostalgia, according to Boym, contains a progressive and critical dimension, as it is concerned with the rebuilding of individual and collective memory; it is unlike restorative nostalgia, which is closely entwined with a lack of imagination and a return to origin. Through displacement, Dudek rejects home (or “nest”) as an idealized place of origin, opening it up toward something that is always mutable and relational, decisively unfixed and transitional. The burn marks featured throughout the reconstructed apartment are the visible markers of such reflective transformation. They are remnants of a previous performance in which Dudek used smoke flares—often employed by football fans as a celebratory accessory during games and at times as projectiles against their opponents—to mark a horizontal line across the walls of the space, while scorching family photographs on display in the process. Dudek, echoing his own violent past as a football hooligan, reuses materials in an aggressive way to demarcate a complex reflective constellation that constantly doubles, reimagines, and rearranges autobiographical elements while simultaneously evading them. Instead of presenting a return to origins, the resulting installation is a complex amalgam of potentiality and possibility rooted within an oppressive autobiographical and sociopolitical context. Dudek emerges as a reflective master builder against all odds, engrossed in his past yet always finding novel ways out."
Please find the original article online or in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine.