Padiglione Ceco / Slovacco

Quest’anno per il Padiglione Ceco e Slovacchia ci sarà l’artista Dominik Lang col progetto scultoreo The Sleeping City

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Dominik Lang’s exhibition project is a “quote“ in a text written by history; the testimonial of a man stuck between the cogwheels of totalitarian predetermination; the fictitious cross-generational dialogue of two artists tied by a personal relationship /father and son/. It poses a number of questions regarding one’s view of one’s own past, the selected method of its reading, the possibilities and limits of its re-construction and the related problem of regressive identification and sorting. Lang’s site-specific installation is a visualized reflection of a period in Czech history read through the prism of personal experience. The artist creates a hypothetic model of an exhibition where complicated configurations of objects, artifacts and structural elements are emancipated and combined into a network of interrelated coordinate positions. The arising groupings – sediments of individual memory – form a complex “collage“, a view of the past profiled by the present.

Creating a multi-layered sandwich of meanings, the artist is aware of the fact that the meaning can never be fixed (Luhmann 1995). In his artistic work thus far, D. Lang has typically presented himself in the double role of author and architect, a role that includes manipulating already-finished material and composing new wholes out of it. In the Sleeping City project, D. Lang pushes this basic pattern towards greater complexity, a larger scope as well as a radical strengthening of personal and emotional engagement. As the author says: “The Sleeping City is a visualised meditation on the manner of how we create our own personal history by taking over and yet modifying the established ways of perceiving and assessing the past. “ By means of assorted objects, artistic works and assembled documents, D. Lang allows us to both enter the past and to uncover the volatile intimacy of moments opening “beyond time“. Yvona Ferencová