Marcin Dudek: Neoplan

The artist’s sixth exhibition with the gallery runs concurrently with his solo show at Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp, and the launch of his new monograph. Neoplan harnesses the raw energy of a football fan club on the road to support their team at an away game in a hostile rival city. The imposing shell of a disused and disassembled tour bus runs across the gallery, branded “Neoplan” and painted with the snarling dog logo of Bucharest team FC Dinamo.

Neoplan continues Dudek’s practice of creating “memory boxes”, installations archiving lost spaces specific to his own experiences yet emblematic of the latent toxicity and violence associated with the construction of group identity. Splayed across the gallery floor, several seats serve as sites for small film works, interacting with three wall-based collage works. Diagrammatic in their form, each piece delves into individual biographies of several self-proclaimed football hooligans and thugs, putting faces to the narratives explored. The collages and installation are punctuated with fragments of stadiums, tickets, banners and other ephemera that comprise Dudek’s vast ongoing research archive devoted to the subculture that possessed him during his teenage years as a member of a notoriously violent Krakow football fan club.