Marcin Dudek: PAWILON
Opening reception | Thursday 15 October, 6 –8pm
Edel Assanti is pleased to present PAWILON by Marcin Dudek, the artist's seventh exhibition with the gallery. Coming of age during the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, Dudek’s practice engages with the strategies of improvisation and imagination that emerged from an environment defined by instability and precarity. The exhibition focuses on the titular ‘pawilon’, a local supermarket in the Kraków council estate where the artist grew up.
In Dudek’s work, memory serves as both inspiration and medium. His installations frequently take the form of ‘memory boxes’ - sculptural environments archiving lost spaces specific to his own experiences. Within these arenas, complex dynamics are allowed to play out, enriched by the inconsistencies, errancies and disjunctions that characterise our relationship to definitive and traumatic episodes. To create these installations, Dudek strips architecture back to its barest structures, employing repurposed objects with symbolic weight in skeletal frameworks; at once familiar and eerily uncanny.
PAWILON explodes the supermarket of Dudek's youth into fragmented pieces, exploring the structures and social functions of these third spaces in Poland over the last fifty years. Insulation foam, corrugated steel, and other materials are used to divide the space. Smaller wall-based works and found objects are placed in and around these partitions, as though they formed part of the fabric of the supermarket itself. An accompanying soundscape echoes through the installation, recorded inside the pawilon. Into this routine hum, the artist interjects memories of less legal activities: subtle shoplifting, noisy grab-and-go robberies. As part of the preparations for the exhibition, Dudek conducted a small-scale archaeological dig behind the supermarket, excavating a midden of discarded capsules and broken bottles. These unearthed products are placed on the denuded shelves of PAWILON, blurring the line between subjective memory and documentary research.
The supermarket of Dudek’s upbringing was a site in which subtle signs of transition and dysfunction coexisted with rapidly changing social forces and the artist’s own coming of age. This crucial food source concentrated the social dynamics of the community and acted as a barometer, allowing periods of global economic prosperity and decline to be observed. Precise touchpoints and particular associations are unpicked; snaking queues stretching from the building’s entrance, early experiences of intoxication on the tree-lined lot, the frustration of incessant shortages and acts of petty crime. Rather than wholesale recreation, Dudek places elements carefully, evoking the supermarket as a site of communality, violence, stupor, economic activity, pleasure and boredom.
By staging Dudek’s memories of an actual place in time and history, PAWILON acts as a mechanism through which broader social and political forces are rendered visible. Dudek’s investigations into the precarious and unstable systems that govern our lives find their form in the ghostly architecture of the supermarket aisles. In doing so, he creates an environment in which specific motifs and associative nods are employed in service of prompting our own recollections - of desire and fulfilment, need and supply, conflict and survival.
About Marcin Dudek
Across performance, sculpture, installation and painting, Marcin Dudek repurposes salvaged materials and memories to interrogate the psychology of group dynamics and the structures that shape our everyday lives. Often archival and site-specific, his installations frequently take the form of ‘memory boxes’ - immersive sculptural environments that archive lost or inaccessible spaces drawn from his own experiences. His subjects have included cafes, supermarkets, football stadiums and hair salons; sites of everyday interaction where social relationships are negotiated and behavioural norms take shape. Within these arenas, layered narratives unfold, shaped by the inconsistencies, ruptures, and distortions that characterise our relationship to formative and traumatic events. His research ties his personal archive to a broader history of society’s inseparable relationship to spectacle, whilst developing an artistic vocabulary attuned to fragmentation, instability, and the unreliability of memory.
Dudek (b. 1979, Krakow) studied at the University of Art Mozarteum, Salzburg, and Central Saint Martins, London, graduating in 2005 and 2007 respectively. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany (2024); IKOB - Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen, Belgium (2023); Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris, France (2021); MNAC National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania (2019); and the MWW Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Wrocław, Poland (2019). Dudek has participated in group exhibitions at the Kronika Center for Contemporary Art, Bytom, PL (2025); the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2022); Entreprendre & KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels, Belgium (2021); The Warehouse, Dallas, US (2020); and many others.
His work is included in public and private collections including the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, Berlin, Germany, MWW Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Wrocław, Poland and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania. His first monograph, Department of Subterranea, was published by MER in 2015, followed by Slash & Burn, published by Hopper & Fuchs in 2023. In 2025, Dudek received the Prix de Sculpture de la Fondation Marie-Louise Jacques. Marcin Dudek lives and works in Brussels.
For any press enquiries, please email Athena Diego (athena@edelassanti.com).
Marcin Dudek, Klatka II, 2025. Acrylic paint, steel, medical tape, UV varnish on wood, 42.5 x 21.5 x 3.5 cm (closed), 42.5 x 62 x 3cm (opened). © Marcin Dudek. Courtesy the artist and Edel Assanti.
