31 May 2023 Twisted metal, screeching tyres and shattered glass: there’s been a catastrophic accident. A bus has crashed into the gallery, and its splayed remains have been scattered across the space by the impact. The results are brutal, uncomfortable, unsettling, but like any accident, you can’t look away.
The bus was found abandoned and derelict in Romania by Polish artist Marcin Dudek. It had once belonged to a Dinamo Bucarest fan group, used for years to ferry ultras to away games. The shattered windscreen that greets you as you walk in tells the tale of the vehicle’s final act: troop transport taking enemy fire until it could move no more.
Dudek found it whole but broken down and then took it to pieces. It’s reconstituted here but it won’t drive again. Instead, it acts as a container of history. Written into the rows of torn seats, stinking, fetid carpet and shards of glass are a million stories of togetherness and conflict. People convened here, came together to travel and show faith in something they truly believed in. Once they arrived at their destinations, they fought against those who opposed them – rival fans – like modern crusaders decked out in Adidas.
You walk down the central aisle of the bus past rags and shredded seats. Videos show stomachs bubbling with beer, anonymous buildings, and faces passed out either from exhaustion or from violence, it’s impossible to tell.
The bus canopy is ripped open to the sky like it’s been frozen mid-crash. A final video shows groups of fans fighting in the stands.
The installation might have football at its core, and it might be based on Dudek’s own past as a teenage hooligan, but this is about something so much bigger and more universal, and it’s utterly brilliant, powerfully, overwhelmingly, discomfitingly affecting. The bus is a wounded body bearing the scars of its past. These are the shattered remnants of lives lived and acts committed. This is about togetherness, the mob, the mass, community and unity, and it's about violence. Everyday, constant, terrifying violence. It’s an overwhelming, suffocating confrontation with our own capacity to do harm, to come together, to believe, and ultimately, to die.
