Edel Assanti’s Fitzrovia gallery has been filled with rough pre-formed architectural panels to give the impression of somewhere else entirely – PAWILON by Marcin Dudek. Born in Krakow in 1979, Dudek grew up in the Soviet era and witnessed Poland enter its Third Republic in the early 90s, then enter the European Union in 2004. His project here dives into his childhood memories of place alongside the culture and politics contained within, to reconstruct as a therapeutic and social-archaeological study.
Considering this geopolitical and cultural change, Dudek returns to the architectures and landscapes of his youth: the Pawilon supermarket, an apartment for drinkers and dropouts, and a rubbish tip. During a period of poverty and shortage of food, for Dudek the supermarket is more than a space of consumption, but also of escape. The queue he would wait hours in was a space the local community would gossip and organise. The drainpipe and roof were where he escapes as a child to avoid school and police. The items inside sometimes offered a glimpse into other worlds, notable a cheese triangle (sold individually) was a remarkable, rich taste of the west.
A cheese triangle makes an appearance in one of several reliquary-like pieces, hinged architectural materials that open up to reveal intricate collages of image, object, and drawing. It is presented within a stripped-back structural installation that speaks to his memories of Pawilon, half sculpture and half ghost architecture.
Inside Frieze, Dudek is creating a version of his childhood bedroom within an apartment block design replicated across Soviet cities. As well as offering a version of his own personal youth and an architectural form recognisable to many visitors who also grew up in a similar apartment, it will provide the very infrastructure from which other Edel Assanti artists’ work will be presented, much also considering notions of home and the domestic.
