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. 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 behavior 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. Text: Katrina M. Brown.