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 .
Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people...
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Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
Ukraine is under tension due to the politics of President lanoukovitch since 2010...
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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 New York City’s Chinatown, subject Suat Ling Chua’s morning exercise is to practice the hula hoop...
At 90, Photographer Fred Baldwin Still Has ‘So Much Work Left to Do’ - The New York Times Lens | At 90, Photographer Fred Baldwin Still Has ‘So Much Work Left to Do’ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/lens/fred-baldwin-photography.html Give this article Share Advertisement Continue reading the main story Fred Baldwin reckons he could have become a writer — if the manual Olivetti typewriter he used while studying at Columbia in 1955 had spell-check...
Whispers - Photographs by Yuanbo Chen | Text by Magali Duzant | LensCulture Feature Whispers A multi-layered approach to visual storytelling — a conversation, a portrait, and a detail of a personal object or a place — captures the shared experiences of Chinese citizens coping with isolation while abroad during the Covid lockdown...
Transgression, triggers, and the thousand cuts of “Blunt Knife” | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Photo courtesy of the artist June 25, 2019 By Corrie Tan (2,700 words, 13 -minute read) Content Warning: Mentions of a sexual relationship involving a teenager This response contains major spoilers for Blunt Knife by Eng Kai Er and A Doll’s House by Theatre of Europe...
To produce the series of sculptures collectively titled Utarand , Prabhakar Kamble relocated his studio to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, near the village where he was born into a family of daily wage earners...
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