Marcin Dudek: The Ground Harbours the Soul

OOF Gallery is the latest visitor attraction to arrive at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium as the club continues to create a new sport and leisure destination for London. The gallery’s aim is to create a venue for contemporary art, but away from the mainstream art world – a place where everyday football fans can encounter art in an approachable, intelligible, non-judgemental way.

OOF Gallery

The crowd is reimagined as a single, vast body in Polish artist Marcin Dudek's new exhibition at OOF Gallery in the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Based on repeated research and audio-recording trips to Tottenham Hotspur matches (alongside sound designers Mark Burman and Jon Calver), Dudek's latest work combines sound and sculpture into a series of heady explorations of communal emotion and the power of the crowd.The show unfolds in three acts, much like the experience of attending a football match. It opens with a splintered cork body, suspended from the ceiling, emitting the sounds of pre-match rituals and the walk to the stadium. The central gallery features a triptych filled with speakers, filling the space with recordings of football chants and supporters living through a game in real time. The final work, a helmet-like cork sculpture, allows viewers to immerse themselves in the emotions that follow a football match: the ecstatic joy of victory, the crushing disappointment of defeat.Dudek’s work focuses on disentangling his memories of an intense, often violent past as a teenage football hooligan in Poland. Previous work has seen him creating installations out of abandoned fan buses, underground gyms, balaclavas, flares and photos of his own youth. By recording the sound of fans and football matches for this latest body of work, Dudek is taking viewers on a journey through traumatic memory, and the healing power of unity.As ever with OOF, this work isn't about football. Dudek instead is using football to explore what it means to be part of a unified whole, to give up your individuality to become the crowd. 'The Ground Harbours the Soul' imagines the stadium as a place of belonging, of communal experience and mass emotion.

This project was created through the ReSilence residency program, a S+T+ARTS project which received funding from HORIZON Europe 101070278. S+T+ARTS is an initiative of the European Commission to foster alliances of science, technology, and the arts. The ReSilence project connects artists, designers, and various scientific partners to research the impact of sound in the city.

Works created with: Mark Burman (sound design), Jon Calver (sound design), Olivia Perce (Studio Marcin Dudek), Jean-Yves Rousseau (technical assistance) Sound recorded by: Marcin Dudek, Mark Burman, Jon Calver, Paul Kobrak, Louis MorandText: Eddy FrankelSpecial thanks to: Manuel Cirauqui,  Berta Gutierrez, Beatrice de Gelder and the Brain &amp; Emotion Laboratory at Maastricht University, Harlan Levey, Françoise Baudry, Amélie Bouvier, Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels, Edel Assanti, London and Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

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Marcin Dudek: The Ground Harbours the Soul

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Marcin Dudek: The Ground Harbours the Soul

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