The primary purpose of The Sleeping City, the installation prepared by Dominik Lang for the Pavilion of the Czech and the Slovak Republics within the framework of the 2011 Venice Biennale, was neither a mere presentation of the figurative sculptural works, tinged by abstraction, created by Lang’s father Jiří Lang (1927–1996) in the communist 1950s, nor a reconstruction of the museum architecture that would have hosted them in their own day. Rather, this particular installation incited viewers to ask themselves what conditions guarantee the visibility of art, what are the causes of it falling into oblivion, and by extension, what will happen with the highly, unavoidably visible art of today in fifty years’ time. In The Sleeping City, Lang’s focus—based on a large collection of his father’s sculptures—was the afterlife of art; in The Lovers, his latest project, he employs several variants of the motif of loving couples for the purpose of inquiring into the representation of bare life.
Artist
Dominik Lang (CZ)Karel Císař
The curator and writer is an assistant professor of aesthetics and art theory at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He holds degrees in philosophy from the University of Geneva and the Charles University, Prague. He is an editor of Markéta Othová, Walther König 2010, and contributor to numerous publications including Ján Mančuška: Against Interpretation, Hatje Cantz 2011, and MAM Project: Kateřina Šedá, Mori Art Museum 2010. His recent curatorial projects include 50% Grey, MoCP, Chicago 2010 and Any-instant-whatever, Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow 2009.
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