On view: Marcin Dudek at Kunsthal Extra City Antwerp
Kunsthal Extra City presents the first institutional solo exhibition in the Benelux by Marcin Dudek curated by Joachim Naudts. ‘The Group’ brings together visual works and installations around the central themes of crowd psychology and the spectacle. Informed by his violent youth, spent among the hooligans at the hard core of football club KS Cracovia, Dudek’s work has been imbued with questions about safety and violence, group dynamics, family, but above all about our urge to belong.
‘The Group’ brings together seven complex works in the former Dominican, neo-Gothic church in which Kunsthal Extra City is housed. Partly accentuated by this sacred architecture, a multitude of themes emerge: the human yearning for security, the structural similarities between religion and football, the de- and constructive nature of group dynamics and the constant human desire for spectacle. A publication was released following the exhibition. This book has some of his key creations in that period, focusing on what he refers to as ‘Memory Boxes’ and touching on other elements of practice including collage, performance, sculpture and research.
Practical information:
Marcin Dudek | The Group, curated by Joachim Naudts
Date: May 13 — October 10, 2023
Location: Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp
ABOUT Marcin Dudek
Marcin Dudek was born in 1979, in Poland
He lives and works in Brussels
Marcin Dudek is an artist whose objects, installations, collages, and performances touch upon questions regarding the role of control in society, the hierarchy of power, and mechanisms that govern the release of violence and aggression. His use of abstraction to deal with these questions further highlights the effort, anxiety and compulsion that characterize his process of image production.
Dudek’s artistic practice is focused on situations that are based on the confrontation between the world of violence and the world of art. To construct these situations, he often invokes the history of extreme events that have taken place in stadium spaces, paired with events of his own experience as a teenage football fan. Dudek analyzes the abstract concept of aggression, triggered frequently and often without premeditation, within the architecture of any given spectacle.
After leaving Poland aged 21, he studied at the University Mozarteum, Salzburg and at Central Saint Martins, London, graduating in 2005 and 2007 respectively. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Salzburger Kunstverein (AT), the Arad Art Museum (RO), Bunkier Sztuki Gallery in Krakow (PL), the Goethe-Institut Ukraine, and The Warehouse Dallas (US). His installation “The Cathedral of Human Labor” (2013) is on permanent view at the Verbeke Foundation in Belgium. In 2018, he presented a large installation at Manifesta 12 Palermo, which was followed by a solo exhibition at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum.
