Roman Ondák

Roman Ondák. Escena. Del 19 de septiembre de 2013 al 23 de febrero de 2014

Roman Ondák: this is such (an) artwork of myself in which the audience is the main focus so it's basically a small shift of given situation which in this case is a camouflage with the building with a fraction of the building which is replicated and though work will be completed only after people will step on it or they will come to my exhibition and they will interact between themselves in no other way than just in being there. And the main focus on audience is due to the complicated nature of this building (...) Immediately when you start thinking about what could be in this building you're in the trap the building has in its core. So after several steps I ended up with this idea to… instead of showing any object or anything physical inside of the building, to build this ring around the whole Palacio Cristal and I open the backdoor which is usually used only for loading the artworks for installation and to make it possible to the audience to step outside and to move on this walkway on one side or the other and to make nearly full orbit of the building and therefore having kind of doubled perspective of the inside and of the outside as well.

When we come to the exhibition we are interested in art objects or paintings or whatever contemporary art can be, and shift out from this to observe each other in a natural way, that you're part of something and just the audience is creating the space or fulfilling the space with their behavior or with their... or in the way they behave is something that will be gained here, I believe.

There are some situations in our life which demand our empathy or just feelings which cannot be transformed to any physical form. Somehow it´s not necessary and somehow it´s is impossible at the same time. And it's even impossible to copy such a situations, because there are many. But somehow suggesting or creating a certain platform in which this kind of feelings or emotions could be shared or could be generated is an idea of this work as well, because what I'm doing here is that I am proposing people to have different perspectives not only of the building but of the exhibition as such, but also of themselves.

The idea was to make it as free as possible to let people flow through the space, through my work back and forth even without noticing that there is something changed in the space. But at the same time, as I said, it's something that is framed, like our societies in general. So we have the freedom, but we also have rules we have to depend on or rely on or to be part of. So in a way this contrast between freedom and a framed situation is a tension which makes this work more just a joy. So it's not only an exercise but it's also something that tells you about your own position in society and how your contribute to society or what you expect from the society. So I am not saying that this work is political, but it's not only a visual concept, but it's a concept which plays with certain rules our society is based on.