In 2009, Roman Ondák won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for Loop, the Pavilion of the Czech and Slovak Republics, for which he brought the same plant-life and trees growing outside inside. This highly considered installation epitomizes Ondák's work. With often discreet, tongue-in-cheek, conceptual, participatory modes, he succeeds in profoundly questioning the art world and its established quirks, exhibition spaces, behaviors like queuing, labeling or various pedagogical approaches, visitor experience, any misplaced preciousness about authenticity or authorship. Various tactics (asking friends for drawings) or forms (shoelaces for instance) recur in his photographs, performances, installations, videos.
Borderlines are deliberately blurred between the exhibition space and reality. This is infused by his relation to each specific project context and by his own ongoing experience of changing Eastern Europe.

Roman Ondak was born in 1966 in Zilina, Slovakia. Lives and works in Bratislava .