Roman Ondák: Turning the Ordinary into a Space for Observation and Reflection

Over the last thirty years, Roman Ondák has explored the rhythms of everyday life, turning familiar gestures, objects, and social routines into subtle sites of inquiry. Continuously testing and stretching the boundary between art and life, Ondák turns familiar situations into poetic explorations of time, memory, and identity. What might appear neutral or self-evident is revealed as a dense network of learned behaviors, social codes, and internalized norms. Rather than interrupting these systems outright, Ondák nudges them slightly out of alignment, just enough for their mechanisms to become visible. Meaning accumulates slowly, through repetition, duration, and shared presence rather than dramatic intervention.

These concerns are brought into focus in The Day After Yesterday, Ondák's first large-scale exhibition in Central and Eastern Europe in over two decades, currently on view at Kunsthalle Praha. While the exhibition spans more than thirty years of work through a range of media, Ondák has been careful to avoid framing it as a retrospective. Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, early and recent works are placed in dialogue, emphasizing continuity and the persistence of questions that continue to shape his practice. Across these works, Ondák's subtly trains the viewer's attention, encouraging careful observation of the everyday.

Drawing from his lived experience of Czechoslovakia, as well as its political transition, Ondák uses his biography as a lens through which to examine wider social and political systems. Across the exhibition, the artist employs his characteristic methodologies: the collapse of private and public space, the layering of different temporal registers, and an understanding of time as cyclical rather than linear, where political history folds into individual lives.

The work The Day After Yesterday, from which the exhibition takes its name, pairs a found snapshot of Ondák's family with a staged photograph taken at the same location, in the same clothes. By combining chance and careful orchestration, the work brings different moments into close proximity, allowing past and present to appear side by side. The title itself further underscores Ondák's light, slightly disorienting way of thinking about time. Across the exhibition, the private continuously intersects with the public, inviting reflection on how individual experience takes on shared meaning. For instance, works such as Sea into My Room, Free Doorway, and Demarcation transform intimate objects, from the artist's childhood room door to his building's doorbell, into points of collective attention.

Across the exhibition, Ondák repeatedly foregrounds familiar objects placed in unfamiliar conditions, using them to examine how rules and boundaries operate in everyday life. In Do Not Walk Outside This Area (2012), a detached airplane wing is placed directly on the gallery floor, allowing visitors to walk across an object normally off-limits. While the experience may feel rebellious, this access is provisional. A similar condition structures Escape Circuit (2014), where a series of interconnected cages forms a closed loop with no exit. Movement is possible, even encouraged, but it never leads beyond the system itself. Together, these works show how choice can appear available while remaining shaped by constraints, exposing freedom as something designed or simulated within existing structures. In a world marked by deep instability and increasing uncertainty, these works feel especially timely, pressing on questions of what freedom means today and what kind of agency exists within the systems we inhabit.

In Ondák's work, ordinary gestures and acts of participation are never neutral; they carry meaning. Performed by real people in real time, these modest, often banal actions extend from individual experience into the collective, revealing social and relational dimensions. In Across That Place (2008), Ondák turned a simple act—skimming stones across the Panama Canal—into a moment of shared participation. Volunteers took part in a playful activity that unfolded against the canal's complex political and historical backdrop. Photographs, hand-painted posters, and other materials from the event form an installation, extending the action beyond its original moment. 

Perhaps Ondák's best-known participatory work, Measuring the Universe (2007), draws from the familiar gesture of parents measuring their children, bringing this normally private act into the gallery. Visitors are invited to mark their height on the wall, creating a collective portrait over time. The work relies on spontaneous participation, as individual actions accumulate into a shared record of commonalities and differences. As the title suggests, we use our own scale to relate to the world, revealing how individual actions help shape a larger system and the responsibilities that come with it. Placed in a corner of the gallery, Resting Corner features a simple sofa and shelving unit—familiar furniture from socialist-era Czechoslovakia. By sitting, visitors turn an ordinary gesture into a performance, becoming part of the artwork. Those moving around the gallery are also implicated, observed by the seated participants and contributing to the relational dynamics.

Across Roman Ondák's practice, time is experienced as layered and cyclical, with past and present coexisting. The time-scale of political history meets the immanent temporality of individual lives, appearing as forces shaping lived experience. In Event Horizon (2017), this approach is materialized through the rings of a 130-year-old oak tree: each disc marks a year between 1917 and 2016, inscribed with an event Ondák considers significant. As different discs are displayed daily over the course of the exhibition, collective history is continuously folded into the present. A similar compression of temporal distance appears in Bad News Is a Thing of the Past Now (2003), which brings together two black-and-white photographs of Ondák's father and, decades later, the artist himself, seated on the same park bench reading a newspaper reporting on the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Ondák's interest in video and performance reflects the same concerns seen across his practice. His videos center on small, simple actions situated in everyday public space. The Stray Man follows a figure who repeatedly pauses outside a gallery window, looking in but never entering, foregrounding the act of observation and the boundary between art and daily life. Resistance records a group of people moving through an exhibition with their shoelaces untied—a minor breach of social convention that can be corrected instantly, but when shared across the group, registers as a collective gesture, resistance even.  

Ondák’s work trains our eye for how individuals move within the systems they inherit and help sustain. If history returns in cycles, the question is not whether bad news belongs to the past, but how we recognize its recurrence—and what it means to act within it.

The exhibition The Day After Yesterday is on view at Kunsthalle Praha in Prague, until March 9th, 2026.