The specter of the mob has loomed large in 2020’s headlines, from the BLM demonstrations and counter-demonstrations to the far-right hordes that stormed the Capitol in Washington, D.C., to the widespread looting and rioting that is occurring across the Netherlands at the moment, as well as, of course, the fear of crowds that has come to define our collective experience of the pandemic. The salience of mob porn finds a parallel in Marcin Dudek’s long-held fascination with the hooliganism and violence associated with football and its rabid fans - what is also referred to as ultra culture. The autobiographical impulse there is rooted in his own teenage years when he was deeply enmeshed in the ultra way of life, as a member of a Krakow-based football team’s hooligan group. In Ultraskraina (2020), or “Ultra Land”, the artist has materialized the titular phenomenon out of a collage of medical tape, paint and image transfers. An abstract topography that seems to suggest skies, hills and water, the linear patterning of the composition thickens as it travels down the canvas, almost in the manner of the bleachers in a stadium, which appear larger as they descend. In the lower half of the work are “small tape dots and lines collaged together, as a flowing river of dots flows through just as a crowd pours into a stadium, navigating its path to the stands.” Embedded in this milieu, which flickers between the geomorphology of a natural landscape and the architecture of the spectacle of competitive sports, are image transfers of postcards that pay tribute to the fanatical formations of ultra culture, memorabilia that boast the symbols and slogans - often of a bellicose, anti-social bent - of football fan clubs active in Poland in the 1990s. Dudek has spoken of the intensity of the personal experience of being part of a crowd, a dynamic that is well-testified to: “Brought into being thanks to the loss of conscious personality that was purported to occur when human bodies agglomerate, the modern crowd is not reducible to the average of the individuals that make it up.” Put another way, the individual body slips all too easily into the communal one, the singular will becoming subsumed in the mass entity.