Marcin Dudek: NEOPLAN, installation view, Edel Assanti, London, UK, 2023. Photo: Marcin Dudek
Edel Assanti gallery in London recently presented Marcin Dudek: NEOPLAN (May 31-September 1, 2023), a solo exhibition by the Polish artist Marcin Dudek, highlighting the relationship between sports and violence. The exhibition was Dudek’s sixth with the art gallery, running alongside his solo show The Group (May 13-October 8, 2023) at Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp, Belgium, and the launch of his new monograph Slash & Burn (Hopper & Fuchs, 2023). The artist marked the opening of the exhibition with a three-minute intervention using smoke grenades, which are often set off by hooligans at football matches.
NEOPLAN is centred around a derelict touring bus of a football fan club, possessed of a particularly charged history: the now desiccated husk once carried fans of FC Dinamo, from Bucharest, Romania, and still bears the scars from its time spent as a vehicle of visceral, collective expression. The video below explores this piece, which Dudek expands upon in an interview with STIR.
Since NEOPLAN closed, Dudek has been preparing for two solo exhibitions: the first of these is Akumulatory (until November 26, 2023) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Eupen, Belgium, and features multiple memory boxes attempting to reconstruct the spaces of the Polish social housing the artist grew up in. The second is Game Time Choices at Yeo Workshop in Singapore (until November 19, 2023), which presents work examining the politics of labour. These pieces reflect on his time spent in a school for troubled youth in Kraków during the 1990s, where heavy manual labour was used as a tool to reprimand children. As part of the exhibition, Yeo Workshop is also showing a piece about the migrant workers that built the stadiums for the Qatar World Cup.
