gb agency

In his 2018 Lovis-Corinth-Preis exhibition Based on True Events, Roman Ondak deals with current social and political imponderables. Based on true events, the title of the show promises, but in our world of fake news, alternative and post-facts this promise has become disturbing. What is truth and who determines it? And what distance from reality do the words “based on” describe? Roman Ondak’s conceptual art has always posed such uncomfortable questions, and today it is more relevant than ever.

At Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg, Ondak picks up on his documenta contribution Observations (1995/2011) and shows New Observations (1995/2018), both series of photographs taken from a sixty-year-old textbook of human communication. Out of their original context, the photos and captions turn out to be pseudo-scientific and unintentionally funny. The installation Signature (2014) shows the treasured typewriter from Ondak’s childhood, divided into fifty individual parts. The artist dissects his past and reassembles it into a new form. In addition to well-known works such as the film Lucky Day (2006), the exhibition also includes new works: Perfect Society (2018) and Planets I-X (2016-18).