Nilbar Güreş, LOVERS, 2011, genähte Textilien, Halskette, Foto: Stephan Baumann

Deutsche Telekom is the donor of an extensive collection of Eastern European art created over the last two decades. The collection was founded in 2010 and is based in Bonn. The GHMP has also managed to assemble a rather large collection of contemporary art from the 1990s to the present day over the past ten years. Contrary to the initial proposal by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher, the curators of the collection, to exhibit a selection from this remarkable collection, we have decided after mutual discussions to opt for a more active collaboration between our institutions. In the forthcoming project, we present a comparison of the two collecting approaches and attempt to confront the artists and their themes from our side and theirs. We also turn our attention to what both institutions reflect or pursue in their collecting strategies.

Deutsche Telekom works with the entire Eastern European area, while Czech artists are only [...]

Roman Ondak, Parallel Worlds, 2022, Acryl auf Holz, 21 x 31 x 8 cm

Roman Ondak’s practice brings together various methodologies, from simply formulated situations in which he binds relationships between members of his family, various groups of people or spectators entering his exhibitions, to modified found objects or constructed spatial installations. Space and time are often systematically thematised in his works and intertwined with his personal history, bearing fragments of his memories of the years he spent as a child and teenager in relatively isolated Czechoslovakia during the autocratic communist regime.

Ondak grew to understand society’s attempt to order existence through divisions and classifications of inclusion and exclusion. This structure’s failure is what the artist questions in his work by revealing the potential of other orders, other patterns of behaviour, and, ultimately, alternative social and political possibilities. The impression that his work often gives, of [...]