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27/9/2012

Roman Ondak / Bertille Bak

Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris - MAM, Paris

Roman Ondák

The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris has invited Roman Ondák, one of the leading figures in today's art field, to design an exhibition for ARC, the Museum's contemporary art arm. Ondák 's work is often based on the various contexts in which he is invited to do projects. Focusing on reminiscences, minute differences and a sense of déjà vu, he uses memory as a core element, while leaving the viewer's imagination to range freely. In this way his exhibitions become repositories for individual and group experiences. Aiming at more than a simple retrospective, Ondák sees this exhibition as the chance to provide an overview of his current concerns. Among the exhibited works is Measuring the Universe, here in its first French version, which weaves an intangible link with his earlier works. In this ongoing, open-ended piece, which requires the participation of the museum personnel and the public, each visitor can see his or her first name, a mark signifying height and date of measuring inscribed on a wall in the exhibition space. Thus the piece gradually takes shape according to the number of spectators who agree to take part.

Ondák's intention is to create unusual situations and points of view through which our way of seeing the outside world changes imperceptibly. Since the early 1990s, in a complex oeuvre Ondák has been engaging with the heritage of Conceptualism and Minimalism, drawing on both global influences and references specific to the region of Central and Eastern Europe. Roman Ondák was born in Žilina, Slovakia in 1966. He lives and works in Bratislava.

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Bertille Bak

Circuits

The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is presenting Circuits, an exhibition by French artist Bertille Bak, born in 1983. The exhibition follows a Paris-based path involving the artist's two most recent works: Ô quatrième (O Fourth Floor), which looks into the existential questionings of nuns living in a convent, and Transports à dos d’hommes (Borne on Men's Backs), a new project carried out with the residents of a Gipsy camp. Short films, mechanised sculptures, improvised objects, drawings and archival material bring humour, poetry and commitment to Bak's examinations of arduous living conditions and life moments.

These imaginary narratives find their inspiration in the memories of families and communities united by adversity: on the verge of a departure, for example, or condemned to exile or migration. Bak's work, however, is not limited to observation and narration: she also sets out to reestablish bonds and to record the traditions, histories and identities of groups before their dispersion or their disappearance. In earlier projects the artist looked at popular uprisings in a mining district in France's Pas de Calais region and in a Bangkok neighbourhood whose residents were under threat of expulsion; and the survival of Polish culture in New York, ensured by its emigrant representatives. Bak's narrative digressions, which include unknowns whose voices usually go unheard, testify to her commitment and play a part in the shaping of new mythologies.

Ô quatrième (O Fourth Floor)

Comprising a short video together with related artefacts and sculptures, this project looks at the order of the Sisters of Charity, alternating a portrait of one of the nuns with fictional filmed inserts. The video details the artist's interviews with Sister Marie-Agnès, living in the convent of the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal, whose thoughts and memories are accompanied by anecdotes from her daily life. Bertille Bak is especially interested in how the nuns spend their free time, and her picture of convent life interpolates the interviews – including her subject's existential questionings and anxieties about death – with fictional material. In an example of reality outstripping imagination, we learn that the rule of the community requires members to live one floor higher in the building as their health deteriorates. The oldest and most fragile of them thus find themselves on the fourth and last floor. The soundtrack is made up of the sounds produced by the nuns' personal possessions, among them a glass, a tin of polish, a pair of scissors, a flashlight and an alarm clock. These items are on show in the exhibition, together with documentation of their places in the nuns' rooms and on the soundtrack

Transports à dos d’hommes (Borne on Men's Backs)
The overall project brings together a film, artefacts and archival material including luminous stop-by-stop trip indicators transformed to include sound and a painting showing all the landscapes traversed by the Roma on their voyage from Dororhoi in Romania to Paris. The film was shot in a Roma camp in the Paris region. As she always does for projects of this type, the artist began by sharing the community's life for several months. Her project focuses on movements, territories and types of music; it does not directly confront the political and social issues involved, although these are implicit throughout the narrative. The real issue here is finding ways of overcoming the constant hostility the community has to cope with.

Image: © Roman Ondák
Untitled, 2005

Press Officer, Peggy Delahalle tel. 01 53674050, peggy.delahalle@paris.fr

Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris
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