Roman Ondak Bad News, 2018

The work consists of a revolving table and three papier-mâché spheres placed on the tabletop. The table is a found object that most likely originates from an artisan’s workshop in Bratislava, where Roman Ondak works and lives.

The three spheres were made by Ondak using pages from three different widely-read newspapers, the American The New York Times, the Russian Izvestia and the Slovakian SME. The artist collected the newspaper issues for the work throughout the month of December in 2018. The diameters of the spheres is determined by the number of printed pages of each newspaper, as if counting the amount of ‘bad news’ that the newspapers delivered over the one-month period. The surface of each sphere appears as a cacophony of article headlines and text quotes, conveying rather negative messages and thus the eponymous bad news.