Roman Ondak: Event Horizon

With more than four hundred illustrations, installations, photographs, drawings, videos and performances spanning three decades, “Event Horizon” is the most extensive monograph on Roman Ondak’s work to date. It features text by Rainer Fuchs, Friedrich Meschede, Katrina M. Brown. Slovak artist Roman Ondak works in installation, photography, video, drawing and performance art, often involving people he has some relationship with. Ondak spent his childhood and adolescence in Czechoslovakia, then relatively isolated by its autocratic regime, and learned to understand society as an attempt to order existence through divisions and classifications of inclusion and exclusion. The artist addresses the failure of this structure in his work, while deploying the potential of other orders, other patterns of behaviour and, ultimately, alternative social and political possibilities. His work often gives the impression that reality has been slightly readjusted, which in part is a tactical response to the propagandistic alterations of image and word that were the norm during the artist’s formative years.

The Slovak artist Roman Ondak (1966-) made “Event Horizon” out of a 100-year-old oak tree from his native region in Slovakia. Ondak cut the tree into 100 discs, corresponding to 100 years of world history. Each wooden disc features an historical event from between 1917 and 2016, each event chosen by the artist. Each day during the run of any exhibition, one of the wooden discs is hung on the wall. This means that the work is in a constant process, which plays with time and the return of time. Ondak investigates the connection between present and past, recounting the past by creating a dialogue across time and place. The work articulates topics such as freedom, coercion, dream and hope on both a personal and universal level.

Although the title “Event Horizon” describes one aspect of the work, it also refers to the horizon line we see when the work is on the wall. The work thematises the boundary between major events in the world and their influence on our own lives. Ondak’s work encourages us to reflect on history and our own presence in it.

Roman Ondak is a conceptual artist whose work is by its nature innovative, breaking with the traditional notion of an artwork. Through his works, he reconsiders the relationship between art and the outside world, private and public, and personal and institutional. Ondak works in various media, including installation art, photography, drawing and performance.