Slowed-down Journey
2003 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Roman Ondak
As the caption purposely admits, these drawings were made by friends of Ondák’s at home in Slovakia asked to interpret places he has journeyed to. The description of the blond artist wearing the same outfit and bag in places of transit like airports, stations or streets are faithful in straightforward (verging on naïve) styles. His own skill as artist is displaced and delegated to others with no particular gift in draftsmanship. Taking the role of a commissioner recurs regularly in Ondák’s work, other examples include Common Trip (2000) constituted with 128 elements, I’m Just Acting in It (2007) with 24 drawings, for instance. These eight drawings were placed in variegated simple home decoration frames to create a sort of storyboard for the artist’s life. For political, personal or economic reasons, not everyone has similar possibilities for mobility. Ondák’s act of sharing his memories expands the potential impact of art for a different public, made actors on these occasions. The interpretations give different viewpoints but maintain a certain continuity, as if it is the artist’s travelogue once removed. The repetitive descriptions of a walking man have interesting parallels with Francis Alys’s two-dimensional work.
In 2009, Roman Ondák won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for Loop , the Pavilion of the Czech and Slovak Republics, for which he brought the same plant-life and trees growing outside inside. This highly considered installation epitomizes Ondák’s work. With often discreet, tongue-in-cheek, conceptual, participatory modes, he succeeds in profoundly questioning the art world and its established quirks, exhibition spaces, behaviors like queuing, labeling or various pedagogical approaches, visitor experience, any misplaced preciousness about authenticity or authorship. Various tactics (asking friends for drawings) or forms (shoelaces for instance) recur in his photographs, performances, installations, videos. Borderlines are deliberately blurred between the exhibition space and reality. This is infused by his relation to each specific project context and by his own ongoing experience of changing Eastern Europe. Roman Ondak was born in 1966 in Zilina, Slovakia. Lives and works in Bratislava .
Colors:
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Tony Labat
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Paul McCarthy
2008Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
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Roman Ondak
2003This work needs to be considered in relation to one of his performances during which people were made to queue in front of the Kunsthalle of Frankfurt in 2003 (Tate Collection)...
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Julius Koller
Anti-Happening refers to Koller’s 1965 manifesto, ‘Anti-Happening (System of Subjective Objectivity)’...
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Roman Ondak
2003This work needs to be considered in relation to one of his performances during which people were made to queue in front of the Kunsthalle of Frankfurt in 2003 (Tate Collection)...
Related artist(s) to: Roman Ondak » Irit Rogoff, » Joachim Koester, » Ann Demeester, » Annie Vigier, » Annika Eriksson, » Ariel Schlesinger, » Aurélien Froment, » Ceal Floyer, » Dan Perjovschi, » Daniel Knorr
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Ceal Floyer
2007NO POSITIONS AVAILABLE is composed of panels covering the entire wall of the gallery exemplifying one of the tendencies of the artist...
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Joachim Koester
2007Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula...
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Joachim Koester
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Aurélien Froment
2008The Théâtre de poche video is inspired by Arthur Lloyd / “Human Card Index”, a magician who was famous for being able to take out of his pockets any image requested by his spectators...
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Adrian Villar Rojas
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Karam Natour
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Karam Natour
2016Humor and Law, Kick of Duality, Point of View III, Selfie with Pan, and Thinking of You are part of an ongoing series of digital drawings Karam Natour has been creating since he was studying at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem...