In Dudek’s work, memory serves as both inspiration and medium. His installations frequently take the form of ‘memory boxes’ – sculptural environments archiving lost spaces specific to his own experiences. Within these arenas, complex dynamics are allowed to play out, enriched by the inconsistencies, errancies and disjunctions that characterise our relationship to definitive and traumatic episodes. To create these installations, Dudek strips architecture back to its barest structures, employing repurposed objects with symbolic weight in skeletal frameworks; at once familiar and eerily uncanny. 

PAWILON explodes the supermarket of Dudek's youth into fragmented pieces, exploring the structures and social functions of these third spaces in Poland over the last fifty years. Insulation foam, corrugated steel, and other materials are used to divide the space. Smaller wall-based works and found objects are placed in and around these partitions, as though they formed part of the fabric of the supermarket itself. As part of the preparations for the exhibition, Dudek conducted a small-scale archaeological dig behind the supermarket, excavating a midden of discarded capsules and broken bottles. These unearthed products are placed on the denuded shelves of PAWILON, blurring the line between subjective memory and documentary research.

The supermarket of Dudek’s upbringing was a site in which subtle signs of transition and dysfunction coexisted with rapidly changing social forces and the artist’s own coming of age. This crucial food source concentrated the social dynamics of the community and acted as a barometer, allowing periods of global economic prosperity and decline to be observed. Precise touchpoints and particular associations are unpicked; snaking queues stretching from the building’s entrance, early experiences of intoxication on the tree-lined lot, the frustration of incessant shortages and acts of petty crime. Rather than wholesale recreation, Dudek places elements carefully, evoking the supermarket as a site of communality, violence, stupor, economic activity, pleasure and boredom. 

By staging Dudek’s memories of an actual place in time and history, PAWILON acts as a mechanism through which broader social and political forces are rendered visible. Dudek’s investigations into the precarious and unstable systems that govern our lives find their form in the ghostly architecture of the supermarket aisles. In doing so, he creates an environment in which specific motifs and associative nods are employed in service of prompting our own recollections - of desire and fulfilment, need and supply, conflict and survival.