Marcin Dudek: Akumulator, 2013-2018

19 September - 26 November 2023

Akumulator is a one-to-one scale replica of a gym Marcin Dudek built in the 1990s, inside of the squatted basement of his Kraków social housing block. It is the first of what the artist would later describe as "memory boxes": rooms from the artist's past in this housing block, recreated with their original dimensions and materials, spaces of both physical and psychological transformation.

Akumulator, 2013-2018. Steel, wood, medical tape, acrylic paint, mirror, neon light, paper, leather, silicon, cell phone. 220 x 290 x 220 cm - 86 5/8 x 114 1/8 x 86 5/8 in

Marcin Dudek was 10 years old in 1989, the year the Polish People’s Republic collapsed. He was living in Kraków, in a cramped social housing block with his parents and four older siblings. Like the rest of his generation, Dudek’s upbringing was marked by the uncertainty and chaos of this national transition.

Preoccupied with their survival, the Dudeks found strategies to stay afloat. With food systems in flux, Dudek’s mother took on the daily, time-consuming task of finding groceries for the family. In the confusion over property rights and tenant laws, Dudek’s father and older sister started a clandestine shoe repair shop and hair salon in the building’s basement.
With both of his parents busy, Marcin Dudek was left to roam the streets, following his older brothers into the tight-knit ranks of ultra fans at a mere 11 years old. These young men formed a community around football, finding a sense of unity there amidst the fractured landscape; this sense of collective safety came at a cost, however, of living with the constant threat of the law and of random outbursts of violence. Marcin spent his formative years immersed in this culture, working odd factory jobs, brawling in his free time, and painting at night in the secrecy of his bedroom, copying old masters from the pages of art history magazines.

In 1998, Dudek’s father passed from a fast-moving cancer, possibly accelerated by his years working with chemicals in the small, damp basement. Marcin and his young friends converted the shop into a DIY gym, using found materials to craft their equipment. This space was one of many, part of a 1990s Polish phenomenon of makeshift gyms under social housing blocks, where hundreds of disaffected youth trained for clashes on the streets above. Years later, Marcin would self-publish an artist book, Akumulatory (2013), recounting this trend through a series of archival images.

After a turbulent adolescence, art offered Marcin an escape. At 21, with the help of his oldest sister, he left Poland, earned a BA, then an MFA, all while working side jobs and learning two languages. As he made his own path, he developed a visual language to process the events that shaped him.
Akumulator is the first “memory box” which Dudek created from 2013 - 2018. He has since replicated his teenage bedroom (Head in the Sand, 2022) and his sister’s hair salon (Zakład, 2023), spaces which his relatives still inhabit, and which he recovers piece by piece during renovations. As the family environment becomes more stable, Marcin is able to revisit the past, object by object: the standard-issue basement door, which his father insulated with the cardboard from the Dudeks’ first television set; the radiator, which his brother was handcuffed to as a child, the day that social services came to visit. Every element of Akumulator is charged with stories, from the artist’s personal life, to the standardized Soviet architecture hijacked by the creativity of the building’s occupants.

Each corner of the room is occupied by a DIY gym apparatus: the bench press’ weights are made from the dismembered radiator attached to a welded metal bar; the bench rests on a carpet, woven from black cloth tape in a design recalling the faux-oriental patterns which were popular in the era of Dudek’s childhood. A monumental collage made from cloth tape acts as one of the walls of the space, taking inspiration from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s imaginary prisons (Carceri d’Invenzione, 1745-50). It resembles an underground map, suggesting countless other spaces just like this one, unseen, below our feet.
Akumulator, installation view at Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels, Belgium, 2020.

Each corner of the room is occupied by a DIY gym apparatus: the bench press' weights are made from the dismembered radiator attached to a welded metal bar; the bench rests on a carpet, woven from black cloth tape in a design recalling the faux-oriental patterns which were popular in the era of Dudek's childhood. A monumental collage made from cloth tape acts as one of the walls of the space, taking inspiration from Giovanni Battista Piranesi's imaginary prisons (Carceri d'Invenzione, 1745-50). It resembles an underground map, suggesting countless other spaces just like this one, unseen, below our feet.

A tense atmosphere of solitary preparation and self-transformation pervades in this stripped-down training facility, where bodies and minds took shape. The installation, as the original space it recreates, embodies the anti-readymade; analogue resistance to mass mechanization; a sanctuary of neglected materials. Not intended as an empty exercise machine for repetitive bodybuilding movements, this space is, according to Dudek, a manifestation of resistance, a model for survival in economically deprived situations. Exhibition guests inhabit the space of Akumulator as temporary visitors to a private space, which speaks at once of a hidden collective history, a deeply personal narrative, bound together by a shared weight.
(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

Akumulator, installation view at Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels, Belgium, 2020.
ABOUT Marcin Dudek

Art as a strategy for living; Marcin Dudek’s practice builds from autobiographical experience and expands to explore the broader phenomenon that shaped it. These include the rituals of subculture, DIY economy and crowd dynamics – how one gets pulled into many and what control is lost as a mass gains momentum. Often working with found, salvaged or repurposed materials, Dudek constructs objects, installations, painting and performance, touching upon questions of power and aggression in the context of sport and cultural spectacle. His paintings offer insight into his overall approach, which incorporates a rather obsessive work ethic, meticulously slicing and manipulating medical tape, rubbing images into the cloth and building up a painting through collage. The level of detail and craft is manic and neurotic, meditative and thoughtful, as violence becomes an energetic aesthetic reflecting a lived experience.

After leaving Poland aged 21, he studied at the Mozarteum University Salzburg (AT) and at Central Saint Martins (London, UK), graduating in 2005 and 2007 respectively. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (RU), Salzburger Kunstverein (AT), the Arad Art Museum (RO), Bunkier Sztuki Gallery (Krakow, PL), the Goethe-Institut Ukraine (Kiev, Ukraine), and The Warehouse Dallas (US). His installation The Cathedral of Human Labor (2013) is on permanent view at the Verbeke Foundation in Belgium. In 2018, he presented a large installation at Manifesta 12 Palermo (IT), which was followed by a solo exhibition at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum (PL).

In 2022/23 Dudek’s work was exhibited at Kunsthal Extra City (Antwerp, BE), The IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art (Eupen, BE), The Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool, UK), Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, TEA (Tenerife, ES), Frieze Art Fair (London, UK), SMAK - Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art (Ghent, BE), The Biennale of Painting (Deinze, BE), The BPS22 Museum of Art of the Hainaut Province (Charleroi, BE), Centre Wallonie Bruxelles (Paris, FR) and The Warehouse (Dallas, USA). His first monograph was published by Hopper & Fuchs in 2023.

In 2024, Dudek participated in the Ortigia Contemporanea festival (Siracusa, IT), and presented a solo exhibition at Museum Ostwall (Dortmund, DE). In 2025, he will have solo shows at the MNAC - National Museum of Contemporary Art (Bucharest, RO) and at OOF Gallery (London, UK). Dudek lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.