10 May 2018 Marcin Dudek is featured in the group exhibtion The Ratcatcher at Wroclaw Contemporary Museum.
His work Tunnel Recording is a site-specific intervention which acts like a nervous system, responding to the artist’s movements while sleeping or working at his computer.
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Andrzej Czarnecki’s documentary about a professional rat exterminator and his strategies. The main character reveals the methods of his work by describing how he exterminated rats in a meat processing plant. Although the man appreciates and respects rats’ intelligence, he is ruthless. His knowledge of the rodents’ psyche and behaviours makes it easier to kill them. By acting methodically and consistently, he always wins. First he gains the rats’ trust by giving them food, and once they have got used to him – they die.
The documentary was made in 1986, three years after the end of martial law in Poland. At that time it was interpreted as a metaphor of the systematic surveillance of the anti-communist resistance movement by the secret services. Nowadays the film and the strategies of extermination featured in it justify other, not only purely historical, interpretations. In the exhibition, the story has been treated as a starting point for a parabolic narrative about reality and a phantasm of the fall of the Latin civilisation. Owing to its essay-like form, the display accentuates tensions between the ideas, needs and desires of an individual and the social determinants. One of the main questions posed by the exhibition asks: “Is your mind full of goodness?”
The Ratcatcher in on view through 24 September 2018
