Marcin Dudek (b. 1979, Kraków, Poland; lives and works in Brussels)

Zakład (2023)

Zakład (2023) is a full-scale Memory Box: a reconstruction of a squatted basement salon in a Kraków housing block, created by the artist’s sister following the collapse of the Polish People’s Republic. Dudek dismantled the space and rebuilt it with original fixtures and surfaces, embedding human hair collected over years into its architectural fabric. Using repurposed materials and obsessive collage, he transforms his personal archive into an immersive environment that interrogates power, ritual, and group dynamics. A site of informal labor, exchange, and survival, the work underscores the resilience of female labor and care within precarious economies. Archival still and moving images, a recurring element in Dudek’s practice, are integrated throughout, grounding the installation in both personal memory and post-communist social history.

Nestman (2025)

Nestman draws the viewer in with a rhythmic beat, like a distant dancefloor. This surreal triptych opens to reveal a miniature scene of the KS Cracovia stadium, as seen through a fan’s fever dream. The pitch has been invaded by a naked crowd, cheering as they dodge the referees. The benches are covered with a fog of orange smoke, so thick that it seems it’s eating away at the cement. Above the chaos, a glass orb plays found cellphone footage of various football matches. There, between two flares, we find the Nestman, changing shapes as he conducts the endless, infectious dance.

Marcin Dudek creates Memory Box installations, paintings, sculptures, and performances rooted in lived experience and transformed into a language of social abstraction. His work explores crowd psychology, identity, trauma, and survivalist economies shaped by subcultural ties and the transition from communism to hyper-capitalism.

Select solo exhibitions include Museum Ostwall im Dortmunder U (2024), IKOB - Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen (2023), MNAC - National Museum of Art, Bucharest (2019), and MWW Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Wrocław (2019). Select group exhibitions include the Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art, Bytom (2025), BPS22 - Museum of Art of the Hainaut Province, Charleroi (2023), TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Tenerife (2022), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2022), The Warehouse, Dallas (2020), to name a few. His works are held in collections including the BPS22 - Museum of Art of the Hainaut Province (Charleroi, BE), Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, PT), Zabludowicz Collection (London, UK), and the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection (Berlin, DE), among others.

Harlan Levey Projects (HLP) works closely with a select group of artists, tending for narrative-driven, conceptual and often research-based work, which explores various social, scientific and technological phenomena. HLP artists are represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (NY), The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Centre Pompidou (Paris & Brussels), Kunsthaus Zürich, S.M.A.K. - The Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, and many other museum and library collections in Europe and the United States.