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 .
Maude Arsenault – Resurfacing – AMERICAN SUBURB X Skip to content Her work invests the themes of female representation, private space, domesticity and intimacy within the framework of a photographic and material approach which oscillates between abstract compositions, self-portraits, landscapes and images documentaries...
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
Articles of Virtu - Photographs by Bryan Birks | Text by Magali Duzant | LensCulture Award winner Articles of Virtu Prized old automobiles—that most American of obsessions—are the entry point to the surprising beauty and tenderness of their owners, the communities they belong to, and the aspirations they hold dear...
This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010...
In his photographic series Périphérique (2005–2008), Mohamed Bourouissa used the composition of classical paintings to stage the portrait of friends and young people in the banlieue s (suburbs)...
7″ Single ‘Pop In’ by Martin Kippenbergher consisting of a vinyl record and a unique artwork drawn by the artist on the record’s sleeve...
Phan Quang’s portrait series Re/cover grapples with a lesser-known history in Vietnam...
In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...
To make Minimal Secret (2012), Jarpa created sculptures based on pages of declassified CIA information about the United States’ involvement in Chile...
Ukraine is under tension due to the politics of President lanoukovitch since 2010...
Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers...