Roman Ondak, '3015', 2015

Sculpture, Main Entrance (outdoors)

With his sculptures, Roman Ondak adds no new material to the Campus—or, at least, nothing that was not already present in the materiality of the building. Whereas “construction site art” is usually characterized by countering the profanity of the building under construction and the building materials used therein with something materially different and explicitly unrelated, Roman Ondak's sculptures are just differently formed and colored cousins of the steel columns that provide the building’s main support and stand exposed at the ground level. In the midst of these supporting columns, Ondak’s versions—dysfunctional failures in terms of the task assigned to them—disturb the originally planned column-ensemble by appearing to be ruins of their supposedly original forms. In contrast to the others, Ondak’s have begun to rust, lean off axis, buckle, and break.

The apparent loss of their structural functionality, along with the fact that they linger on as ruins, evokes thoughts—at least on an abstract and hypothetical level—of malfunctions that defy all statistical probability. This questioning of the actual infallibility of the supposedly assured is additionally lent a temporal dimension by the obvious allusion that these dysfunctional columns make to ruins of ancient columned monuments. The temporal axis and the directions in which they face dictate Roman Ondak’s chosen title of “3015:” a present that is conscious of its future—and thus of its responsibility to this future.

Roman Ondak, born in Žilina, Slovakia in 1966, lives and works in Bratislava. Ondak’s oeuvre is characterized by an interventionist practice that subtly approaches reality in order to question and thus allow conscious perception of everyday experiential phenomena in an unconventional and poetic way. Ephemeral performances and direct interventions form the basis of his site-specific works. The artist also frequently initiates participatory projects involving amateurs. Roman Ondak’s works have been shown at renowned biennials and exhibition venues such as the 53th Venice Biennale, Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, the 6th Berlin Biennale, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Tate Modern in London.

Text: Kathrin Rhomberg & Pierre Bal-Blanc