Marcin Dudek: PAWILON
****
Marcin Dudek has become an archaeologist of the self, digging through his past, his memories, trying to figure out how it all came to this.
His work has always been largely based on the Polish housing estate he grew up in: the basement gyms and football violence that marked his childhood and youth. But this show takes us into something a little more mundane: the local supermarket. He has recreated its metal walls here, rusted and filthy, a dead mouse petrified against the corrugated steel. Inside, he has laid out bottle caps, stones and torn cigarette packets excavated from outside the shop itself. Proper archaeological stuff, but useless, worthless, and meaningless except to him.
The metal collages on the wall are covered in burn marks and images of crowds and police vans. In the communist 1980s, the supermarket was a hub, a sanctuary. But by 1989, capitalism had arrived, bringing with it abundance – and crime.
Dudek’s whole look is dystopian abstraction, taking all the wreckage of his past and reassembling it into fractured grey images and threatening installations. All the rusted and twisted metal here is full of anger and incomprehension, but you get the sense that if he keeps digging, keeps uncovering and excavating the past, it might eventually start making sense.
