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:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » KADIST
Voluspa Jarpa
2012To make Minimal Secret (2012), Jarpa created sculptures based on pages of declassified CIA information about the United States’ involvement in Chile...
![Kenya breakdancing picking up but no federation to support it](https://s.france24.com/media/display/08aaa004-7976-11ee-bf9b-005056a90284/w:1280/p:16x9/m:{"brand":"FRANCE24","lang":"EN","program":"","cartouche":"KENYA","hash":"0564cbc2c1d03197d2b96f7db79de046bcab5271291652b6e77d4731fdca93a7","title":"Breakdancing%20%250Apicking%20up","id":"5535ce5c-cd7e-11ed-854c-005056bf30b7"}/EN_20231101_215400_215533_CS.jpg)
© » FRANCE24
Kenya breakdancing picking up but no federation to support it - France 24 Skip to main content Kenya breakdancing picking up but no federation to support it Issued on: 02/11/2023 - 12:50 Modified: 02/11/2023 - 12:53 01:33 While breakdancing will feature in the Paris 2024 Olympics, many enthusiasts in Kenya are attracting younger generations to this urban dance popular in the 1980s...
© » LE MONDE
Sélection galerie : Farnood Esbati chez Christian Berst Cet article vous est offert Pour lire gratuitement cet article réservé aux abonnés, connectez-vous Se connecter Vous n'êtes pas inscrit sur Le Monde ? Inscrivez-vous gratuitement Article réservé aux abonnés Sans titre (vers 2020), de Farnood Esbati...
© » KADIST
Thomas Kilpper
2009These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin...
© » KADIST
Mohamed Bourouissa
2017In 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)...
© » KADIST
Douglas Gordon
2002Blind 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...
© » LENS CULTURE
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...
© » KADIST
Ahmet Ögüt
2022Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers...
© » NYTIMES LENS
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...
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22496659/ss_856dc0a7fdf8bffb04cff24a3c9176e628879ff5.jpg)
© » KADIST
Christian Jankowski
2008In New York City’s Chinatown, subject Suat Ling Chua’s morning exercise is to practice the hula hoop...
© » KADIST
Oded Hirsch
2012Oded 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...
© » KADIST
Maria Taniguchi
2015Maria Taniguchi works across several media but is principally known for her long-running series of quasi-abstract paintings featuring a stylized brick wall device...