Dominik Lang’s (*1980) exhibition project The Sleeping City links two different sculptural approaches with various historical contexts against the background of an intimate family relationship. The presentation connects the works of two authors linked by a personal association, father and son, and thus creates a basis for developing a fictitious inter-generation dialogue. One of the project’s starting points is the fact that the works of Dominik Lang’s father, Jiří Lang (1927–1996), were “short-circuited“ by the absurdity of the times, i.e. of the forced uniformity of the 1950s society in the Soviet Block, and have remained – in spite of the initial laudatory epithets: “a good start“, “promising“ – deposited in the author’s studio, “incarcerated“ in its own times. The stifling atmosphere of a studio crowded with “sleeping“ statues, the social insulation, resignation, and apathy, but also one particular 1960 relief, called “The Sleeping City“: these are the sources for the title of D. Lang’s multi-layered project. In his site-specific installation, he puts forth a hypothetical model of a never-realized exhibition: he handles the works of the generationally antecedent artist as a material for formative activity, torn out of its historical context, as phantoms of times gone, inset within new scenes and constellations. In doing this he stages an uncompromising image of the “impossibility“ enforced by the given circumstances [...]
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