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.

Dudek found himself wandering around a football stadium in Bucharest prior to the pandemic, scouring for artefacts that he could use as part of an ongoing habit of sourcing detritus from sites of sports and spectacle. Behind the terraces, he found a bus that had been abandoned and had also likely been squatted in, bearing the red snarling dog logo of FC Dinamo, which feels disquietingly similar to the insignia of a military unit. In Dudek’s words: “Dinu Guțu, an anthropologist and a writer, who is also a local supporter of the club, introduced me to FC Dinamo and helped me to negotiate the sale of the bus with a bottle of good Armenian whiskey. That’s how I was able to purchase it. Then, we learned that this bus that once belonged to the team had been abandoned behind the stadium after being vandalised and nearly destroyed.”

The artist transported the bus to his studio in Brussels in 30 pieces, but could not work on it through the pandemic, and was only recently able to begin developing it into an art installation. It has since been completed. Dudek’s fascination with the bus is twofold—firstly for the history contained within its shattered windshield, the graffiti on its sides, its ripped-up seating, and its general state of disrepair; and secondly, for the memories it triggers for the artist himself as a youth growing up within the fan club culture of football team MKS Cracovia. He tells STIR, “In my practice, I have been developing the idea of memory boxes; objects, and installations that serve as time capsules, containing elements of my past. These are a way to confront the past, understand it, and accept it. Here, the bus triggers my own memories of travelling to and from football games, but it also carries its own stories and those of hundreds of people who have passed through its doors. For this reason, I became very interested in the seats that came to represent individual personalities, and the hierarchical sitting and sleeping arrangements, which might have existed between them.”

As the artist began working on the bus, converting it to a series of memory boxes, he found inspiration in the painting Autobus (1959-61) by Polish artist Bronislaw Wojciech, which depicts a bus filled with hellish characters, driving through a ruined landscape. Dudek, in a sense, builds upon this concept by allowing audiences to walk through the bus, within which he has made additions of his own, including video installation segments.

To return to Dudek’s past as a youth within football fan club culture, his creative beginnings saw him absorbing art through magazines, while hiding this interest from the other club members. “In the 1990s, I was living in a small room with my brother, where I was reading and drawing, and dreaming about having an art exhibition at Cobra, our local pub,” Dudek says. “In this room, I developed the idea of applying to an art university. When I took that step and moved to Austria, things slowly started becoming possible: it has not been easy, but the road exists from a school to an artistic career.” Through his studies and beyond, he endeavoured to build a striking visual language through collage. His work represents football stadiums around the globe using elements collected from the stadiums, with many such pieces also exhibited in NEOPLAN. These works give audiences a deeper look into the artist’s world, which is one where sports, collective fervour, and violence intermingle frenetically.

Dudek discusses the creative preoccupations that drive his practice, "Sports and violence have probably been linked from the very beginning. The earliest recorded sports riot occurred around 59 AD in Pompeii, between the inhabitants of Pompeii and nearby Nuceria, following taunts during a gladiator match in the local amphitheatre. From their origin, sports have been a way to exorcise conflict, to express the desire for violence between people; stadiums and arenas around the world have been the stage of aggression, atrocities, and death.” He approaches the link between sports and violence from a place of personal experience first and foremost, which is a result of his exposure from a young age to what he describes as the “dark side of this football subculture.” The underbelly of the football world’s close linkage with criminalities such as hypernationalism, drug abuse, and racism is well-recorded, and the artist uses his work as a means to break down and explore his own past brushes with the sporting culture’s incendiary elements, while providing his audiences, on the outside, a look inwards.

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.