Over the past five years, Dudek has explored the materials, messages and political contexts of the stadium in an ongoing investigation of group behaviour and crowd control. The artist’s preoccupation with football hooliganism has autobiographical roots, retracing Dudek’s steps as a teenage member of Cracovia football fan club. In 2013, Dudek published Akumulatory (translation: “Battery”), an artist book collating snapshots of underground DIY gyms in Poland, which Dudek sourced from online forums where images of these adapted training facilities are shared. The actual gyms are created in squatted residential spaces, with equipment made from whatevermaterials are available: steel, wood, concrete, bricks.

Akumulator, the artist’s fourth exhibition with Edel Assanti, sees Dudek construct his own immersive DIY gym. Dudek’s installation is made using rudimentary materials that convey scarcity, utility and urgency, combined with adapted personal belongings. A tense atmosphere of solitary preparation and self-transformation pervades in this stripped down training facility, where bodies, ideologies and cultures take shape, ready for confrontation above ground on the streets.

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