The Stray Man
2006 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
10,40 min
Roman Ondak
“A man wanders near the windows of a gallery, situated adjacent to the street. He occasionally gazes through windows into the gallery but never enters.” Passersby are numerous since these windows are by a tram stop on a busy street. It is surprising to note how few of them take any notice of this man peering repeatedly through the slightly tinted glass into an empty meeting room with no distinctive signs to be seen. It turns out this was a performance at the Kunsthaus in Graz. A annunciating drawing with the same title was shown in Ondák’s solo show More Silent Than Even at gb agency in Paris the same year; this show also included an invisible eavesdropping device. The uncomfortable connotations of surveillance, whether visual or aural, in everyday situations or art galleries, were in focus. The camera shots following this strange act of insistent staring and squinting vary from different perspectives outdoors or from inside the space looking at him, with consequent shifts in soundscapes. In The Stray Man ‘s exercise in curiosity, nothing happens. This action in the public sphere could appear useless. But this extended, seemingly trivial, gesture is a contemporary poetic take of the act of looking, on its meaning today, its possibilities and difficulties applicable to the art world as much as to human and socio-political permissiveness or constraints at large.
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 of genres: » conceptual artists, » performance artists
» see more
© » KADIST
Tony Labat
2008Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions...
© » KADIST
Jorge de León
2015Jorge de León most well-known work was a radical gesture, and one of his earliest artworks: in his 2000 performance, The Circle, de León sewed his own mouth closed as a protest against the silencing of citizens in the face of social corruption...
© » KADIST
Meschac Gaba
2010The headdresses, woven from artificial hair braids, symbolize historical icons including Martin Luther King, Kwame Nkrumah, Fela Kuti and King Guézo of Dahomey...
Related works featuring themes of: » Performance Art, » Slovakian
» see more
Other related works, blended automatically
» see more
© » KADIST
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)...
© » KADIST
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...
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
© » KADIST
Loris Gréaud
2004This work refers to the “Dream Machines”, an experimental object invented by the painter and writer Brion Gysin and the scientist Ian Sommerville, and which is composed of a light bulb with light passing through slits in a rotating cylinder...
© » LE MONDE
« L’Art du livre », de Michel Melot et Anne Zali : la splendeur à l’ouvrage Offrir Le Monde Article réservé aux abonnés Reliure originale en soie violette brodée d’or, fleurs et ornements en soie, chiffre de Marie de Médicis et couronne en perles fines, dos long à semé de fleurs de lis dans un encadrement, ruban de gros de Tours parme, avec lisière en dentelle dorée...
© » KADIST
Société Anonyme: Week 5 March 3 – 16, 2008 Saturday, March 8, from 6 – 9 p.m Presentation of “Art conceptuel, une entologie” (Editions MIX, edited by Gauthier Herrmann, Fabrice Reymond & Fabien Vallos) “Art Conceptuel, une entologie” is a collective translation experience of 278 conceptual artworks, most of them available for the first time in French...
Other works by: » Roman Ondak
» see more
© » KADIST
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)...
© » KADIST
Roman Ondak
2003As 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...
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
» see more
© » KADIST
Ceal Floyer
2007NO POSITIONS AVAILABLE is composed of panels covering the entire wall of the gallery exemplifying one of the tendencies of the artist...
© » KADIST
Joachim Koester
2007Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula...
© » KADIST
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...
© » KADIST
Joachim Koester
2006Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » KADIST
Sergio De La Torre
2011This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...
© » ART CENTRON
Recovered Van Gogh Masterpiece Takes the Spotlight Again - Artcentron Home » Recovered Van Gogh Masterpiece Takes the Spotlight Again ART Feb 10, 2024 Ξ Leave a comment Recovered Van Gogh Masterpiece Takes the Spotlight Again posted by ARTCENTRON Vincent van Gogh, The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884)...
