I’M RECALLING THIS scene to Marcin Dudek, a Polish artist who is as fascinated with the role stadiums have played in war as I am. I’m back home in Brazil, he’s in Brussels, where he lives. I tell him that there’s something about the framing of that view, of looking
down on the stadium, that brought home the melancholy of his own collaged paintings of arenas. Each painful work an abstract aerial view of a sports stadium in a moment of national trauma. He tells me he is planning a trip of his own to Ukraine: I told him how
I’d bought a Shakhtar Donetsk scarf in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square in Kyiv, off a woman selling them metres away from a sea of photographs of dead young men, fallen at the front. Shakhtar have played at the Kyiv stadium in exile since 2014 and the Russian occupation of their home region in eastern Ukraine, their own stadium now abandoned, with weeds and time overtaking the pitches and terraces. We talk about how since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv’s terraces have fallen silent too, matches played without supporters as the threat of missile strike remains ever present, with bunkers prepared for the teams should they be needed mid-match
‘The arena is always a place that records history, it attracts the extremity of a place in a particular moment,’ Dudek says. ‘It has its roots in the Colosseum of course, so it has been a macabre place from the beginning. It was always a destination for drama and life’s theatre.’ When he comes to Ukraine, Dudek will do as he always does when making these
works; he will scour archives and books for photographs, map the area, annotate the history and then collect material from the site: loose bricks, a rubber band perhaps, a bit of wire from a fence. Any detritus that might portray the DNA of the building. These
he will collage together on the surface of the painting: sometimes whole, but more often ground to a fine powder and mixed in the palette. His found images will be transferred onto medical tape and then pressed onto the surface of the work, often as parallel lines of repetition, giving an architectural or woven quality to the composition.
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