Marcin Dudek : Zaklad (Hair Salon)

Zakład is a full-scale replica of a room in the squatted basement of a Kraków council estate — part of a series Marcin Dudek calls Memory Boxes. Following the dissolution of the Polish People's Republic in 1989, and the confusion around property ownership and tenancy laws, the artist’s sister, Anna Dudek Gajewska, established a semi-clandestine hair salon in one of these underground rooms. The compact, hand-built space remains active to this day. 

The salon, or zakład in Polish, first opened in 1992. In 2022, Dudek began a meticulous renovation of the salon, salvaging its fixtures, furniture, and tools. After upgrading his sister’s space, he then rebuilt the original at full scale, introducing subtle interventions that evoke the texture of lived experience. At first glance, the installation appears as an ordinary room transposed into the gallery. Slowly, its quiet poetry begins to surface. There is an eerie sculptural stillness where absence is made tangible, recalling Rachel Whiteread’s casts of domestic interiors that preserve memory as negative architectural space.

Human hair, collected from the salon, is embedded into wall panels that form part of the architectural structure. These layers of bleached blonde, bright red, and natural grey accumulate like geological strata, traces of different temporalities. An ambient soundscape recorded inside the functioning salon intensifies the feeling of time: the ticking of a wall clock thumps like a heartbeat; scissors slice and snip in a chattering chorus. Even though the salon is no longer physically underground, a feeling of constraint remains – a sense of claustrophobic intimacy, marked by narrow circulation and overstuffed cabinetry. 

The room expresses a quiet joy all the same, as a place of care, cleanliness, and beauty. Footage from Anna Dudek’s 1992 wedding is projected from the hood of an old hairdryer onto a delicate tulle curtain, the fabric catching and softening the image. The video traces a milestone moment — vows and kisses exchanged, flowers passed from hand to hand — while echoing the everyday rituals of the salon itself. As the camera pans across the wedding, viewers might begin to match the coiffed and hairsprayed guests to the shades of embedded hair. This glimpse into Anna’s personal archive lends the salon a new dimension, one articulated by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, where economic independence becomes the foundation for a woman’s self-expression. 

In the neighboring room of the original basement, the artist’s father operated a clandestine shoe repair shop. Like the salon, it was built entirely from salvaged materials and formed part of the informal economy that emerged in post-socialist Poland — unregulated, uninspected, and sustained by necessity and craft. After his father’s passing, Dudek and his friends transformed the workshop into a makeshift gym — a communal training space for teenage boys, later recreated in the earlier Memory Box Akumulator.

This cage-like enclosure, bearing the residue of domestic life and personal history, recalls the psychic architectures of Louise Bourgeois’ Rooms, where emotion is held and processed through space. Dudek’s approach in Zakład speaks a related language — yet here, his transformation of off-grid interiors gestures more toward Gordon Matta-Clark’s radical engagements with architecture: acts of cutting, reclaiming, and reconfiguring space as a form of social critique.

Seen together, Akumulator and Zakład form a compelling pair: one a site of physical exertion and youthful ambition, the other a space of feminine labor and care. For Dudek, reclaiming and inhabiting these spaces goes beyond survival; it becomes a creative act of self-realization. Across both works, a portrait emerges of a community shaped by proximity, trust, and time.

Zakład exists as an intimate record of thousands of haircuts, exchanged confidences, and fragments of life. It bridges past and present, celebrating a DIY aesthetic shaped by adversity, solidarity, and ingenuity. Here, women’s work is highlighted as the invisible infrastructure of community, shaping space, identity, and connection, one snip at a time.